New Words and Watercolour by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Autumn Serenade

I was heading home, hot and tired but having gotten a lot done, I was not too displeased. I had even managed to sketch the little stone relief of the goat above the water spout at the bottom of the stairs which now only managed to drizzle water.

On Sunday mornings there would be brown bottles, broken jagged gems, littering the fountains slow growing puddle. The goat had his back to the viewer but was looking over his shoulder as if the sound of the sculptor’s chisel had taken him by surprise. To the lower right corner of the relief grew a clump of wild thyme, the scent of which always made me hungry unless late night revelers had pissed by it; then I would have to wait a few days to enjoy its perfume.

I had met Cecilia for drinks. I got a whisky which she always sort of disapproved of because of the hour, feeling for herself that Campari and soda was not really drinking. She had looked good, always shown to best effect when turned out in a simple dress.

From perspiration and a shirt collar which had grown too big, the shoulder strap of my bag cut into that place where neck meets shoulder. My hand held the paper bag but carefully as I thought about perhaps doing a mural on it which would now be scented with charcuterie and cherries.  

Normally, my hands would be free, clasped behind my back as I walked but my book bag was full up with sketch pad, the first volume of Mandalbaum’s translation of Dante and the bottle of Corsican brandy I had been planning on giving to Cecilia to pass on to Ottorino.

 "Paris Street" (Watercolour on paper)

 by Wayne H. W Wolfson

 The holidays were coming and I enjoyed the novelty of being the good son as there was no blood between us, the complete lack of expectation made it far easier for me. Good because I chose to be, a skin I could shed at anytime.

He had been sick with a flu which left him ten pounds lighter. She was the obedient daughter and would never tell him that he could not drink but anyone trying to expand the glass bottle marimba which had slowly been taking over the buffet would face her fury.

It was all right, I knew a little place next to a tobacconist in Rome where I could get him a new chess clock instead.

She would notice that I , among his closer friends did not disrespect her by trying to smuggle in contraband.

“You play nice.”

The phrase had an almost baby talk connotation which I hated but was one which she could murmur smoothly in English not sounding too bad when carried by her slightly husky voice. She also practiced saying no with her eyes so that she could at least lie to herself as she got ready to go out.

Tomorrow we would go to the concert together and I would kiss her neck as the lights went down.

I got home and through the living room window, saw a bird pecking at a bit of dirt below the geranium in the window box. He looked up at me and cocked his head to the side. It was just the two of us and for now, that too was all right.

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2010 

One of Bluepepper's most beloved contributors, Wayne H.W Wolfson is an American artist and poet who has just returned from his annual sabbatical in Paris. Click on the post-heading for more of Wayne's work and contact details.

New Poetry by Libby Hart

 

Lately

I’ve been crossing myself

at odd moments.

There was a time

I would only do this in church

and its ritual meaning

was nothing more than obedience.

There has been a great gap of time

since then and now

and I wonder why,

suddenly, I’ve taken it up again.

Is it akin to what Steinbeck once described

as a duck walking over my grave?

Or is it my soul touching on

the unknown and recognising it?

With great reverence stitched on my face

I make the sign of the cross

wondering if, indeed,

it is because you have remembered me.

- Libby Hart 2010

Robin

Small apparition,

a perfect shape of fire.

Once I held your warmth

in both hands.

I murmured safe passage,

ripe crimson words

Then swift grace followed.

Wonder soared inside the New Year.

- Libby Hart 2010

Wild calling

A fear of drowning

can make a man test himself

against the cool shock of salt water.

Each day he presses on with purpose,

but soon will scull the shore

with all that force inside of him,

one oar stroke at a time.

Once he called the whales to come,

watching the wide, sparkling ocean

with all the enthusiasm of a true believer

until they emerged with a mermaid’s flourish

inside a glimpse of fluke then a mighty roll,

barnacle jewellery glinting in the sun.

- Libby Hart 2010

Libby Hart’s first collection of poetry, Fresh News from the Arctic (2006) received the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Prize. She is also the recipient of a DJ O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship at The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Her book-length poem This Floating World was devised for stage and performed by Teresa Bell and Gavin Blatchford (2010). Publication of This Floating World is forthcoming through Five Islands Press (2011)

Calling all Poets!

The August winds have finally died, leaving me sitting on my frozen hands and with a soft ringing in my ears like all my ghosts come home to roost. While I wait for the first sanguine buds of September, I am CALLING ALL POETS! Refer to the submission guidelines in the sidebar before submitting, please.

The Blake

On Saturday 4 September at 1pm join Judith Beveridge, acclaimed poet, academic and poetry editor of Meanjin, in conversation with the winner of the 2010 Blake Poetry Prize.

National Art School Gallery, Forbes Street Darlinghurst.

The winner of the 2010 Blake Poetry Prize will be announced Thursday 2 September.

NSW Writers' Centre

PO Box 1056

Rozelle NSW 2039

T  02 9555 9757

F  02 9818 1327

E  blake@nswwc.org.au

W www.nswwriterscentre.org.au

Close the Gap

 

 For those precious few of you outside the ever-burgeoning Anglosphere, in June of this year the elected Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, was ousted in a palace coup after a series of poor showings in the polls. Polls: the credulous being flattered like cynics enabling the venal to be led by the leaderless. Kevin Rudd had served as Prime Minister of Australia for a total of 31 months and was at one time the most popular man ever elected to the office. However, the failure of the Copenhagen talks (at which he was a prime motivator) seemed to shake his confidence in any prospect of an Emissions Trading Scheme being passed in his first or second term, remembering that the party he was leading at the time is the party of labour in this country and that many jobs were at stake in Labor's heartland running along a 500km coal seam from Wollongong just south of Sydney to Newcastle a little further north. This is a political party so old and so crusted onto the fabric of the Westminster system that VI Lenin had cause to mention it in his pre-revolutionary writings, and for this and many other reasons it is confused by political dyslectics with an ersatz progressive party, which it is if you are talking about a conflict between capital and labour. But despite Whitlam's best efforts, the great party of labour has only ever embraced the progressive movement of the past 50 years like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

And so the man, Kevin Rudd PM, appearing increasingly isolated in his efforts to pair the short-term interests of labour with the long-term interests of the planet, and that Cheshire grin a distant memory, dallied while the knives were sharpened out back and the people turned away from their moon-faced saint. He was ousted suddenly in the small hours of early winter (no mean feat in Canberra) by the very party machine that had lent on him so silently and persistently to renege on policies the Australian populace deemed vital. Progressive policies, mark you, not necessarily in the interests of labour. And so a woman of good standing but little character took his place and a joust for the first office in the land commenced soon after, not between a government and an opposition, but between two oppositions – one to the government of the day, the other to the moon-faced King it had deposed.

A very un-Hegelian dialectic and a very un-Shakespearean tragedy.

Anyway, here endeth the lesson in hubris and that particular stamp of Aussie perfidy that is a field deemed perpetually fallow by all but a few brave poets.

I believe I was edging my way toward mediocrity……

 A symptom of the mediocrity that pervades this once-ebullient country is the fact that on the night of the first televised debate between the leaders of our two main political parties, schedules had to be put back so that politics didn't clash with a reality cooking show. You can probably gauge by the tone of this blog which "event" took preference. The best man won, I am told, although no-one seems to be able to remember his name with any degree of confidence. It was a "historical" moment as much as "history" can be said to  consist of such footprints in the snow.

 In the May issue of Chicago's Poetry Magazine, David Biespiel, offered a slightly less discursive plea for more substance and less spin in the public domain by asking simply: where are the poets? That we are a largely self-reliant lot is a given, that we are passionate is intrinsic to our very calling, for words will argue like a possum in a bag that you either love or put down on a roadside somewhere. 

Biespiel seems to infer that poets revel in their alienation, "that they want no part of democracy's dirty institutions". This would group them with the alienated left of 1960's vintage, which fits snugly with the stereotype of the bearded Ginsberg howling at the God of the New York skyline from his beat-up Chevvy. It is an ordinary perception, though, and a dull calling. Plato tired of it before he died 2,500 years ago. 

Biespel's prolonged diagnosis for the American polis and the American poet ends thus:

The American poet must speak truth to power and interpret suffering. And just as soon as the American poet actually speaks in public about civic concerns other than poetry, both American poetry and American democracy will be better for it.

He is addressing, it needs to be said, a rhetorical people with a rare gift for the taciturn that winks at an Australian like the distant portholes of a passing ship in the night. And an ideological people steeped in books of old Hebrew beside those of a far more recent pedigree, and thus a people condemned to lurch from one extreme to the other, whose centre is an axle that requires perpetual greasing. If they are plunging toward mediocrity, it is not the fault of their politicians per se, the speakers, the masters of rhetoric, but of the thinning rank of listeners in a polis which, for some time now, perhaps the better part of my life, has become an agent that is simply acted upon. Poets, myself included at times, play this victim role very well, and it is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that in a nation with a hung parliament it is we who hold the balance of power, as long as we are prepared to step inside our language and our culture, lay claim to all its baggage rather than continue to stand back and watch the carousel go round and round and round, shying away from  the ghosts who painted every sign.

New Poetry by Phillip A Ellis

Winter Breathing

1

Knowing well the wakening moments, morning
forming in front of my eyes, like some summer
evening after a humid nap, I embrace
the promise of another day with cool breeze.

Time was, I would have looked out of the window
with the dubiety that anticipates,
through the blustery trees, a southerly wind
channelled up from Bass Strait and off the snowfields.

Now, today is almost still, only a thin
abstraction of a breeze stirring the palm leaves
in what is an almost desultory way,
and, in the distance, the horizon is white.

No more cutting off the west with a hearty
escarpment, no more land then blue so brilliant
that eyes water, that little children can dream
that this city is at the edge of the world.

2

When the evening draws in, when the sun hangs low,
I look out on the winter day and think,
not on what I could have done to make better
this world, but with warm gratitude for this day.

The evening, as it breathes in me, will shelter
the world towards night and, for many, some sleep
in a bower, or a den, or nest, or bed,
and I think of so many hearts that beat slow.

I may turn off the lights, listen for night-birds
with my melting ice diluting my whisky
that grows steadily warmer with my palm's warmth,
and is not stirred by the thought of reflection.

And when I sometimes raise my glass to my lips,
I may momentarily remember smiles,
and, in doing so, lay my heart open-faced
to a mirror made of rue and reflection.


- Phillip A Ellis 2010

Snow

Colder than heart's thought,
it seems we're human,
but we are nothing
more than a shadow,
cast by a wan light
fading from attics


- Phillip A Ellis 2010

New Poetry by Stuart Barnes

'ELEMENTS'

1995: Mr. Smith – middle-

aged, eccentric, lived at home with Hamlet’s

evil queen – unleashed a beast: recall, if

not all, as many as possible of

the Technicolors that gleamed at the front

of the fluorescent laboratory

like kaleidoscopic, hypnagogic

celluloid scenes of that city in Oz.

I forget how many there were then (one

hundred and eighteen and counting, now); all

I remember is wishing for the Scare-

crow’s brain, the Tin Man’s heart, the Cowardly

Lion’s courage, and a pair of ruby

slippers to whisk me far away from harm.

Nowadays, more splintered than ever, I

stand each morning like a caryatid

shouldering her colossal portico

all alone over the grim electric

Omega oven’s stovetop, eyes sponging

its greasy, incarnadine coils (all four),

irresistible dials in between the

first and thumb of each hand turning on, off,

on … I can’t help myself: five years ago

zeppelins dropped their terrible cargo,

high school voices, in my mind (such echoes,

still!), and everything changed for good. Jesus,

one day I’ll be freed from the claws of this

disease, from the hells of my elements?

- Stuart Barnes 2010

BLOOD TAKEN

the waiting room’s

fluorescent, like Hell

a roily-faced girl’s

eyes are crazed as a feral cat’s;

and then there’s the stench of baby

crap     invalids

spin between doctors: kaleidoscopic

tops between children

a detached transaction:

my GP’s rote-learned questions,

my ‘yes’ ‘no’ answers

the dreaded tests are specified in puzzling

Latin on greying paper

at reception I

take a tarnished number:

pathology roll call

the nurse

snaps

on his

latex gloves, begins to

hum a golden

oldie like a vampire

– blackout

- Stuart Barnes 2010

JOSHUA

Tips of toes stroking his pink magnolia’s flowers, found

bound in final prayer. Sick at heart,

I never knew him well,

but well enough to fathom he was

forged

of the same tough stuff

as German Jews

or Harvey Milk,

the screws of Alcatraz. Red

knot in my deep, black throat,

sheet’s white ligature

puncturing his.

Why, why, why?

- Stuart Barnes 2010

John Berryman Reads from "Dream Songs", 1968

New Poetry by Benjamin Dodds

Magnapinna species

The elbowed thing drifts
and darts, drifts and darts,

trailing a metres-long train of tendrils
—Rapunzel as incubus.

Held tenuously in bilious floodlight,
it hangs in relief

against the darkness of this Vernian depth.
The remotely controlled camera

jerks on its clumsy x-y axis
to keep it in frame.

At once, this pudendal creature
transfixes and utterly repels;

without instruction,
the muscles at my core brace

when it’s on screen.

She erupts into the room,

one dangling earring already hung,
the other in search of a hole,

tilts her confused-Collie head
and in jarring tones

demands an opinion on how she looks.
She lobs another question over the shoulder

on her way out, not staying to see
me catch the bouquet, or if it’s caught at all.

Is that in space or the sea?


- Benjamin Dodds 2010

Go Jonny Go

Radiohead's guitarist and creative powerhouse, Jonny Greenwood (with all due deference to the genius of fellow band member Thom Yorke), has once again proved why Radiohead are the contemporary creative outfit with this orchestral piece "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", here performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at last year's proms at the Albert Hall. News this week is that Sydneysiders will be able to judge its merits for themselves with a series of recitals in late May at Angel Place. Check your favourite venue guide for details.

 

Poetry Events

Saturdays 5 & 12 June

PLAN TO BE PUBLISHED with Les Wicks
at the NSW Writers’ Centre, Rozelle 10am – 4pm

One of the best known poetry workshop

templates in Australia will be on offer in Sydney.

Be inspired! Be published!

More details: http://www.nswwriterscentre.org.au/html/s02_article/article_view.asp?keyword=june2010 or ring 9555 9757

Exceptional, supporting yet challenging, showing (and earning) respect, a privilege to

attend this leader’s workshop;

serendipity but fabulous; contributed very generously ­ great value for money;

I got more from two days with Les’ workshop than I did over a postgraduate year at university

One of the best-known poetry workshop templates in Australia. OK, you write and are starting to think it may be better if your work gets out there into a wider world, on to the next level. This is for you, all styles, all ages. Les' workshops are known for their constructive and friendly orientation. This workshop will have an emphasis on the nuts and bolts of establishing a poetry audience. A key component of the two days will be traditional workshopping where 3 of each participant's poems are discussed (don't worry, it's not intimidating, we just work together to make a good thing a little better). But this won't be all that's covered. Participants will benefit greatly from applying insider's hints on how the poetry scene works. Poems are examined with a view to finding outlets that fit your style... all in addition to intensive editorial feedback. Other topics include running your own projects, taking up opportunities offered by the internet and, of course, getting your book published. Everyone who so wishes will have their poems published in an established internet magazine. Experience has shown this approach is highly effective… combining practical information with an artistic dialogue among peers over a solid block of time. 

LES WICKS is widely published both in Australia and overseas, an accessible poet with 8 collections to his name. He's been involved in dozens of editing projects over his 35 years as a writer and has done his popular workshops from Hobart to Byron Bay to Perth.

Enquiries ring 9555 9757
 
Full price $270, NSWWC members $190, Conc members $165

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Date: Friday May 21 Voices from Underground

An interactive performance by the Sydney-based group, Harbour City Poets, presenting all-new poems and a new chapbook. These edgy readings feature buried Sydney, from the city margins to the centre. Political, ecological and social issues surface from its history to disturb the smooth façade. Expect sewers and cemeteries, the Police Museum, convicts and larrikins of the nineteenth century, The Rocks (earliest Chinatown), rat plagues, jails, in fact anything subterranean (literally and metaphorically) that our poetic ventriloquy can re-create.

Time: 5.30-7pm
Venue: Sydney Philharmonia Choir Studio
Cost: $5 at door (cash only)
MC: Margaret Bradstock
Time: 5.30-7pm

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Auburn Poets and Writers’ Group (APWG) 22nd May

Zalzala: Inner quakes and after-shocks       10.00am

Event:  ZALZALA: Inner Quakes and After Shocks

Date:    Saturday 22 May

Time:    10.00 am

Venue:  Bangarra Mezzanine

Address:   Walsh Bay, Sydney

Entry :    Free entry

Earth Quakes:  

Listen as APWG goes under the skin of culture shock.

Cultures within cultures:   intersexions of body and soulful words, dislocations  of place and inner languages, a collidescope of climate changes in the whether.

Tremors of the heart:    A collaborative spoken-word performance in English, Tamil, Arabic and Farsi, creating rhythms and linkages between the experience of change in culture and climate.

Shocking:

For further information please phone Auburn Community Development Network (ACDN) on

Tel. (02) 9649 5559 or

Email:  Alissar Chidiac at ACDN   auburnarts@acdn.org.au

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Friday the 21st of May
Red Room invites you to "Poems to Share at SWF!"
When: 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Where: Pier 2/3 Cafe, Sydney
 
On May 21st, The Sydney Writers' Festival hosts a Red Room event,
celebrating seven years of successful collaborations with Australian
poets. Come and mingle with ten of Australia's top poets!
 
Celebrate the work of the Red Room Company and contemporary Australian
poetry at the Sydney Writers' Festival. The Red Room has organised a
special event for the SWF, gathering ten prominent Australian poets
featured in Poems to Share, our new set of poetry cards produced in
collaboration with our design partners, Corban & Blair.
 
Each poet will read their piece from Poems to Share, and also share
another with the audience. Along with the readings there will be a
discussion on the notion of sharing and its relation to poetry;
perhaps an anecdote of a book lent, or a poem read aloud by a lover,
or a favourite poem long kept tucked away.
 
The audience will be seated at tables with the poets, able to share
their own ideas and impressions of the event.
 
Visit www.redroomcompany.org to see more information about the event.

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DiVerse and the S.H. Ervin Gallery

Presents

Poetry from the Salon Des Refusés 2010

A poetic rendering of the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Salon des Refusés exhibition.

Sunday the 23^rd of May 2010 at 3.00 pm.

Part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival for the fourth year, DiVerse perform their specially written poetry, based on the art works of the Salon des Refusés.

The DiVerse poets have been invited to write ekphrastic responses to this eclectic selection of works.

S.H. Ervin Gallery
National Trust of Australia
Watson Road, Observatory Hill, The Rocks, NSW 2000
National Trust Reception: (02) 9258 0123

Friday the 21st of May
Red Room invites you to "Poems to Share at SWF!"
When: 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Where: Pier 2/3 Cafe, Sydney
 
On May 21st, The Sydney Writers' Festival hosts a Red Room event,
celebrating seven years of successful collaborations with Australian
poets. Come and mingle with ten of Australia's top poets!
 
Celebrate the work of the Red Room Company and contemporary Australian
poetry at the Sydney Writers' Festival. The Red Room has organised a
special event for the SWF, gathering ten prominent Australian poets
featured in Poems to Share, our new set of poetry cards produced in
collaboration with our design partners, Corban & Blair.
 
Each poet will read their piece from Poems to Share, and also share
another with the audience. Along with the readings there will be a
discussion on the notion of sharing and its relation to poetry;
perhaps an anecdote of a book lent, or a poem read aloud by a lover,
or a favourite poem long kept tucked away.
 
The audience will be seated at tables with the poets, able to share
their own ideas and impressions of the event.
 
Visit www.redroomcompany.org to see more information about the event.

The "Clare" Suite by Phillip A. Ellis

"Silver Linings (for Clare)"

I will let the clouds come. From horizons
they will glide, at first a white, then a grey
as they meet up, join in a panoply
that may ferry rain. They may well flatter
the skies from New Zealand to New South Wales,
decorating the satellite photos
as they pass silently over the lands
underneath, with watery breath bated.

But the clouds you see are the clouds I see,
perhaps, and will trap the sun's rays; it seems
a strange thing to say, there's silver lining,
but when clouds are heaviest, pressing down
and muttering thunder, the thought of you
cheers me up to no end, and I am glad.

*****

"Firelight (for Clare)"

In the firelight of my childhood, when youth
was yet to be prized by me, evenings spent
before the burning ashes and the hearths
of reverie were not lost to my thought.

Now I remember them, and find it hard
to see in the ashes the same landscapes,
and wonder if it's poverty of thought,
or hardening of the mind's arteries.

I don't need to dream in firelight to see
you, nor do I need a bed of glowing
ashes. All that I need is the merest thought.

And like the ashes you will glow, brighter
than the copper sun at sunset, winter
days, when the wood is brought out, piled up, lit.

*****

"Tinnitus (for Clare)"

I have been thinking of you in quiet
moments, when the winds of the world are thin
hissings in sound-ravaged ears. I would wake
out of a dream of being cisgender
and adoring just you, with quietness
and a sense of peace, and I would hear this
noise, and I would think of you then, and I
feel the soft seep of endorphins within.

You are never really far from my mind,
just as the hissing and whistling never
really fades, just sinks under. Sometimes I
forget that I hear them, unlike thinking
of you: too many good things exist, and
each reminds me, in its own way, of you.


- Phillip A. Ellis 2010

New Poetry by Michael Lee Johnson

Charley Plays a Tune

Crippled, in Chicago,

with arthritis

and Alzheimer's,

in a dark rented room,

Charley plays

melancholic melodies

on a dust filled

harmonica he

found  abandoned

on a playground of sand

years ago by a handful of children

playing on monkey bars.

He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local market

and the skeleton bones of the fish show through.

He lies on his back riddled with pain,

pine cones fill his pillows and mattress;

praying to Jesus and rubbing his rosary beads

Charley blows tunes out his

celestial instrument

notes float through the open window

touch the nose of summer clouds.

Charley overtakes himself with grief

and is ecstatically alone.

Charley plays a solo tune.

- Michael Lee Johnson 2010

Harvest Time

A Métis Indian lady, drunk --

hands blanketed as in prayer,

over a large brown fruit basket

naked of fruit, no vine, no vineyard

inside -- approaches the Edmonton,

Alberta adoption agency.

There are only spirit gods

inside her empty purse.

Inside the basket, an infant,

restrained from life,

with a fruity winesap apple

wedged like a teaspoon

of autumn sun

inside its mouth.

A shallow pool of tears

mounts in native blue eyes.

Snuffling, the mother offers

a slim smile, turns away.

She slithers voyeuristically

through near slum streets

and alleyways,

looking for drinking buddies

to share a hefty pint

of applejack wine.

- Michael Lee Johnson 2007

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois.  He is heavy influenced by:  Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Allen Ginsberg.  His new poetry chapbook with pictures, titled From Which Place the Morning Rises, and his new photo version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom are available at: http://stores.lulu.com/promomanusa. The original version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom, can be found at: http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7.   He also has 2 previous chapbooks available at: http://stores.lulu.com/poetryboy.

Joh at the Bay

 

After all the tireless support she has lent Australian poetry over the last decade, it behoves me to call your attention to a rare reading by Johanna Featherstone (director of the seminal Red Room Company) of her own poetry during this year's Sydney Writer's Festival. Johanna, who I admit is a very dear friend, is attractively reticent about her own poetic efforts, considering how gifted she is at promoting the outpourings of others (precious little of which lives up to her enthusiasm). But I have read enough of her work to know she has a keen eye for the tender absurdities of our condition, and will no doubt be an engaging reader after so many years of practice at public speaking.

When: Sunday, May 23 2010, 1pm-2pm

Where: Bangarra Mezzanine, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay

Cost: Free, No bookings.

ANZAC DAY

 Lest we Forget

Our friends......

New Poetry by Benjamin Dodds

Archibald’s Fountain

After the washout,

we were so wet it was stupid.

We didn’t even get an overture

before dawdling out

into the darkening evening

with the rest of the cackling crowd.

Three or four islands of friends sat hopefully 

on the drenched Domain lawn,

quietly fooling themselves.

If ever there was an event

to be cancelled for rain,

this was it.

I smiled at new families and old friends,

all out for a night of free arias in the open air,

all soaked to the bone now.

But nobody ran.

You can’t get wetter than drenched.

It was Sydney in summer

and no-one was cold.

As we crossed the road back into the park,

I conjured an image:

a silently packed Opera House theatre,

the audience wearing their best

as the roof hinges open 

and the rain comes down.

Corporate-sponsored programmes

curl around hands like wilting posies.

That night we swam 

in the fountain

in the park

with the Greek gods 

and a goddess

and a bronze turtle.

Today I dug up a photo;

I’m wearing a white plastic sheet,

Jesus sandals 

and the dripping rictus of a smile.

I think it’s Theseus

whose bronze scrotum

I cup in my hand.

I only remember this night 

and this photo 

because of Alison Clark 

and her poem 

about these same sculpted figures.

She has dusted off this stupid image

of my wet and juvenile self.

- Benjamin Dodds 2010

 

For more info on Benjamin simply click the post heading.