In Black and White

poetry can make an order...where we can at last grow up

to that which we stored up as we grew.

Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize Lecture 1995.

A photograph, a fading Kodak of a boy.

On the back in my mother’s hand—

Turramurra Bush, 1965—mother, this mother.

A boy sits on an outcrop of sandstone,

the torqued limbs of an angophora shed bark

behind him. In his hands a stick picked up

from the woodland litter, in his eyes,

a sclerophyll shimmer; he tracks lean divinites—

rapture in black and white.

South Turramurra: up an unmade driveway

and down on a shelf of Hawkesbury

sandstone, a fibro house on a bushland block

at the edge of a valley reserve. A hollow

full of cliffs and fallen boulders, of caves

and further galaxies.

Break out of school, run hard to beat the bus

and reappear among the redgums—my friend’s

gym boots impatient on the other side of a passage

under a rock the size of a dump-truck. Down

here creamy sandstone crumbles with the scent

of a long gone river, and the weight of fallen stone

long settled at the angle of repose, rests on my back.

I’m jammed tight, and a little bit ashamed

never to reach eight. When my friend goes for help,

an underworld calm descends; I shed my skin, emerge

with a bloodied belly and zig-zag tongue of a black snake.

The late afternoon sun is poised on the lip of the valley,

reluctant to leave it touches everything with gold

and pink, and holds us weightless in flight

as we leap from one cleaved boulder to the next; on all sides

angophoras stand in marvellous disarray.

The impossible is happening on the run, and the most

we’ll lose is skin—father, this father.

My substrate is rocks and trees, and there’s a prehensile ache

at the sight of a branch that leans across a cerulean

Sydney sky. Here is the ground of a well-weighted line.

Published Broken Ground UWAP