Poetry by Pip Wilson

Page 14

All poems Copyright © 2001-now, Pip Wilson, Wilson's Almanac

 

 

Avalon justice

    (Written in 1991)

Home this morning
pancakes and coffee
electric bright, warm,
SBS test pattern blues.
Leadbelly sang Black Betty.
The wet sou-wester
whewed at my back windows.
I faced east.
Leadbelly sang Love in Vain.

When the train,
left the station …

That was too much man.
I bolted for the breakers.

I caught this morning morning's blackness
staining frigidly the bucking pacific
and all the day a dark and turquoise
night- and white-capped romance
on the seething god.
Like lapis lazuli; something mined.

Beating on the northern headland
and on the shallow beach
made shallower by the sands reclaimed
by Wednesday's bigger breakers,
frothing white choppy rollers.

And like a windhover, Christlike,
a cormorant,
Avalon sea hunter,
two kilos of wilderness
about a stone's throw from the shops,
            wheeling
                        plunging
flies up through the glass-blown ocean
swims up mindlessly disappointed in air
            suddenly
shudders off its wetness like a dog.
A bit pathetic really.
You had to laugh though.

And seldom so leaden
the vista from home
the pellets of winter
the drowned man's foam.

Lately I've been working on injustice
Tim Anderson falsely bound.
By the brutal mother sea
cold infinity
injustice for me I disowned.

There are pools by the smashing and churning
still and clear and cold.
Beaded seaweeds sway endlessly
in fantasies untold
(once I found a cowrie shell
as big as one hand could enfold).

The hunter dropped shadowless
cautiously I released my soul.

When the train,
left the station,
two lights on behind.
When the train left the station mama
there was two lights on behind.
The blue light was my blues,
an' the red light was my mind.

Near the wettest rocks were the pool gardens.
Rosettes were there and buttons,
buttons and velvet cushions,
camouflaged things you wouldn't touch,
all unmoved between the flailing blasts of rain.
Velvet cushions and gumleaf weeds,
mauve broccoli heads,
sultan's turbans,
trails maps and roadways
of another race through the looking-glass.

And all around were bubbled rocks
crumpled and crumbled and jumbled rocks
a jungle of swirling and pudding rocks
beneath the maddened sky.
Animal and brontosaurus rocks
whale and ledge and rotted rocks.
Monumental masons' building blocks of rocks.

Westward, and near the driest paving rocks
shivered desert pools where only sparse oysters,
like pensive poets, clung to rocks for meaning.

Sydney's seasons always turn
round about Anzac Day*.
The March equinox is academic:
March is still summer.
April is mostly warm. Even May.
But expect your first Antarctic blast
some time around Anzac Day.

There is no Australian
so cynical or brain-dead
that a dank chilling shadow
does not cross his skin
around April's end,
who doesn't hear the old shuffling soldiers
on wet streets at dawn,
doesn't see the grey injustice of a seabird
plunging in hungry impotence,
nor sense the injustice
befallen refugee mothers
unsung at dawn services.

On or about Anzac Day
I bolted to the blustery south headland
to light a torch for the creaking diggers,
the failed cormorant shuddering off failure,
the child-mothers of Kurdistan
and Mozambique,
of Site 2 and Ogaden,
waiting interminably by unvisualised borders.
I lit a torch for them.
And a torch for a man my age
imprisoned as the Hilton Bomber
branded like the Boston Strangler
prodded like the Yorkshire Ripper
innocent as the Avalon summer
now passed.
I lit a torch for Tim.

But some unbidden rain
quenched my flames
and some sou'westerly gust
flared up the one injustice I disown.

Lustily and guiltily, like a thief,
I warmed myself at its heat.

Rose up from cadaverous depths:
"Unjust? So say you!
But take that mother's dry hand,
the failed wing.
Look into the disparaging eye
of the sea in her withdrawals:
tell your comic injustice
to your face reflected all bourgeois and blooming.
Tell of disappointment to the treadmill tide,
and to the tidal bones, of love denied."

I looked long into that green eye,
green like gathering hail:
"Who set this up? Walt Disney?
What is unjust in the world?
I may warm myself at
the greatest and least of
my flames to injustice,
may I not?
Those of Nature and man
simply a matter of degree.
Of shuffle and plunge and plea –
all equivalent to a compassionate mind."

I took torch and ran
headlong to the ochre sand
of Avalon,
scarcely blinded
by intimations of equivalence
or blue lights or red lights,
securely knowledged in the
equivalence of solutions
that undoubtedly exist
in the sea of possibilities.
And more: the torch
to the one injustice I disown
burned bright and brighter
for that which has
been consummated by intent and
many wonders shared,
            however shared alone.

 

*Anzac Day, Australian holiday of remembrance of war, April 25

 

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