Poetry by Pip Wilson
Page 7
All poems Copyright © 2001-now, Pip Wilson, Wilson’s Almanac
Summer’s coming (Holy Waterfall, West Pennant Hills)
Summer’s coming, round my feet there clings a smell
so near to earth you have to kiss the ground before you know.
It's warming gum leaves on a concrete path of all
the places you'd expect it; it sends me back to places where I used to go.
That smell, I breathe it in till all my head is filled with it.
I pass back through the years to times I walked along
a narrow, sandy track that wound among the gumtrees,
on a blazing day when lizards ran away. The song
of kookaburras in the trees rings loud and friendly.
And huge expanses, sandstone monolithic haunts of ill-clad little boys
with pocket knives, sharpening sticks for wars, and hunting skinks
along the sand that lines Holy Waterfall; the joys
still have their smell and taste and feel; each cloudy star
of sunlight lying on the waterhole
I still can see, as though those red hot days
like branding irons had impressed their form
upon my memory and soul.
On the fading of delight
My parents have travelled more widely than I,
but I am more travelled than they.
They waved from the back of my Uncle Ray's car
as he drove to the airport - they waved
out the side window then from the rear,
down the road to the airport today.
My mother has travelled the world once or twice
and Dad half as much yet again,
yet she kisses my cheek quite eternally kissed
and he takes ahold of my hand,
for a Singapore holiday, which surely these days
most folks tend to have now and then.
The pity is cold that my youth is so old,
the wonder their age is so young.
Privileged travel, miraculous flight
still lighten their hearts with such strong
soaring wings and favourable airs;
can I forge for my old age their song?
Yesterday's children are innocent yet,
for all of the evil they saw
but we who are young in these easier times
are jaded, morose, firm of jaw.
And gods can't divine why it is that today
young people laugh less than before.
Weep at the headstone of Mrs McLeod,
eighty-two years, maybe more,
who, once as she clipped off a hollyhock stem,
a dragonfly darting she saw.
"My goodness, what colours! What glorious blue!"
to the personless garden she cried.
Edwardian corsets and strictures and cant
and Georgian divisions at last
like armour have rapidly fallen to time,
to rot and to moth and to rust.
But weep at the headstone of Mrs McLeod –
go pray that delight is not lost.
I was watching TV tonight
Rwanda
the tragedy unfolding – that’s the TV cliché but what else can you say.
And how often have I seen footage
and I have compassion for these starving, traumatised Africans
of Ethiopia and Rwanda and Somalia
and how often have those pictures
despite my compassion
seemed to convey images in which I have no resonance.
Black people. African vegetation.
African topography and dust.
The sun shines
as it does on me in Australia
but the fact that there is light is so commonplace
that my mind doesn't leap up and say
"that is my Australian sun! Those are light waves, light reflection
like we have at home!
But tonight I saw footage of the full moon over an aid aircraft.
That was the same full moon I walked under last night
on my way to see a band in the big city while I thought about Rwanda.
Twenty-four hours ago
With the full moon
still fresh in my memory
And as redolent as aviation fuel burning
or cholera dead people swelling up in the equatorial sun.
Last night we all went to sleep under the same moon
Some of us half dead, some indisposed.
July 24, 1994
