Nocturne
The darkest nights were on the farm.
In the absence of the moon,
stars — a broken barbed-wire fence —
glittered in the sky's soft weft.
Creatures in a tank of air —
night's infinite aquarium —
floated free of gravity
in attitudes of weightlessness.
After spirit-lamps were doused
the house drew in upon itself;
its clutch of dreamers moaned and tossed
in stifling mosquito nets — each isolating
sac of mesh a Magellanic cloud.
On Saturdays the homing beams
of solitary farmers' sons
returning from the picture show
sliced through louvres like a sword.
I'd hear their motors throbbing
in the void as fleeting, fickle hearts
and long for places where the lights
extinguished all the dark.
Now, where nights are drenched
in acid radiance that masks the stars,
incessantly the traffic cohorts hurtle blindly past.
Immured within my wooden ark
beside the curlew-haunted park,
my solitude is palpable, vaster than the farm.
'Yesterday-today-tomorrow' wafts
its perfume through the room.
Violet, mauve and moth-white
effloresce in courtyard's crepuscule.
I cannot differentiate the cloying
fragrance of today — the mauve — from violet
of yesterday, and virginal tomorrow.
Now, as then, the night is all
soft promises that can't be kept.
The darkness rings with memories
of cattle bells, remote and hollow.
*Brunfelsia australis ('yesterday-today-tomorrow'):
a toxic member of the nightshade family
Wanderers
A scientist has likened them to 'flying weeds',
such is the ease with which they colonise
new habitats; crossing from California
as stowaways in gold-rush days; fleeing New
Caledonia through funnels of cyclonic gusts.
None of this we knew, nor even guessed,
when we found their stripy caterpillars
clamped to milkweed plants, and carried
them as trophies to our shoebox cells.
Like silkworms, they would munch incessantly,
voraciously — tubiform, minute balloons
with embryonic horns. We watched them grow,
our pretty prisoners, but how did they escape?
Where did they vanish to, and what
became of them, without fresh leaves?
The answers dangled from mosquito nets,
solidified and glazed — live capsules of milky
jade, adorned with gilded dots where cone
morphed into dome and hook,
attached to canopies of mesh.
We kept watch for the final stage,
the metamorphosis from cloistered
nymphs to creatures of the air;
but once more they outwitted us,
sloughed their chrysalises
in secrecy and flew elsewhere.
As we siblings would, one day, leave
our nurturers bereft, gazing at the empty
farmhouse-box and blank, abandoned nets.
Wanderers: an alternative name for Monarch butterflies
Jena Woodhouse is the author/editor/translator of eight book publications in various genres, and has recently completed a collection of poems, Green Dance: Tamborine Mountain Poems, for Calanthe Press, a new poetry publisher based on Tamborine Mountain, in south-east Queensland's rainforest country.