National Poetry Month #15

 The moon goes round, and round again...

Chantelle won't be by the Campfire this evening. She is young, and is too soon learning about those Elders' words, like impermanence, absence, loss; and those Elders' realities like there is no fair and unfair, there is no closure, pain becomes part of us.

She won't read these poems. And anyway they offer no consolation, though they are on a relevant theme. I was down when I first read them and it seemed that I'd always known them. Not so, of course, but I knew - too well - what they were saying. The poems are so simple! yet they show clearly something which - of course! - we knew but we'd never thought about. And having been shown this, we can never tear out this knowledge.

It's OK. You don't have to be strong yet, Channi.

Meditation on the Plums II by Sarah Holland-Batt

She is thinking of the tart, thumb-sized plums

they ate together, and of one in particular.

Unremarkable, except it was the last he gave her.

Of what it was, to stand in the small stone

kitchen, tasting the bittersweet strings

of fruit clinging to wood. The intimacy

in those ruins.Saying plum and not yet

meaning heartache. Letting the ordinary become the last.

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Sarah Holland-Batt recently won the Stella Literary Prize for Australian women authors, for her book The Jaguar. It's one of the most powerful poetic works I've ever read, and deals with the progression towards death of her father. Almost every poem is devastating to anyone who's had a similar experience, yet she tempers that with such sensitive humour... Amazing. Buy the book.

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I find this next poem vaguely humorous too; moreso because I know how some people in my small day's circle would react if they knew I liked it. (Yes Greg and Gary, I'm thinking of you!) Tell me the poem's not true though! God knows, I've seen it often enough. Now, at every funeral, I can't help thinking of this poem.

When I researched the poet, things became even more weird. Apparently, Peter Kocan had spent some time in prison - for shooting the Australian Opposition Leader, Arthur Caldwell in 1966!!! Goodness me.

Barbecue by Peter Kocan

Which of us will one day sit alone

In that last isolation nothing mends,

Remembering a long-lost afternoon

A casual gathering of friends?

The women, milky-breasted, beautiful,

Watching their children toddle on the grass;

The men, skylarking with a bat and ball

Until the Sunday sun begins to pass...

Decades on, this sun will re-emerge

With aching clarity in someone's mind,

To shake and grieve them in their senile age

And shine the brighter when the eyes are blind.

For one amongst us will outlive the rest

And weep to think, perhaps at ninety-five,

About this knife-edged brilliance of the past

When all of us were happy and alive.

And so, my friends, let's cling together now

Against the future that we cannot see.

Let's love each other, for we cannot know

Who the condemned survivor is to be.

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Now this one is funny. Sort of. I couldn't believe it when I found it, because I'd been looking for this exact poem for years - even though I didn't know it until I found it. How could it possibly have been felt by someone else exactly as I feel it, and put down in words for me to find???

For various reasons, I've already got the poem I want read out at my funeral. One of you may know which one. But now, all those who know me, which of you does this poem apply to???

Eggs by Frank Abel

You recognise it immediately - 

the poem you want read out at your funeral,

and know too, just the person to read it,

who will straighten up awkwardly

before the small mournful assembly

and deliver the half dozen stanzas

like a four year old carrying eggs inside

for the first time, without dropping any.

And you're suddenly and immeasurably

thankful for the life that has allowed you

this far: to a darkening balcony above

a frog-strewn garden in midsummer,

thinking about a poem ands the person

who will read it when the time comes,

though you haven't even asked yet.