Anne M Carson is a Melbourne writer who is most happy immersed in creative projects. She gave up social work to write, teach and produce visual art. Her prose and poetry have been featured on local and National Radio and she has curated two PoeticA programmes on Radio National. She has been published in a range of literary journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems, 2005.
The Hearse
All around us rude life swirls. Our guests
mill in the vestibule, spill onto the footpath,
sharing grief and reminiscence. No-one notices
the hearse pull out from the curb, the lead man’s
measured pace. The air holds its breath –
an undercurrent shivers out like an eddy
stirring just a handful of leaves. It brushes
my mind, prickling. My sister notices too.
The sky like a lid on a box, lowers. Underfoot,
the bluestone is hard. Death has us in a press.
We turn in slow synchronicity, each sealed
in our own sling of sorrow. Time opens,
draws us into a pocket of pain and departure.
We watch the hearse move away with our father’s
unaccompanied body. Around us, inside us,
molecules rearrange, adjust to his dying.
Green Is The Colour
Wilson’s Prom 2009
Cloaked in convalescence, the landscape without foliage
resonates with loss. Once forest, now individual trunks
stand out, painted the black of cinder and mourning.
I know the theory – bush regenerates after fire, birds
return, rise from ashes. But the burn here is heartbreaking
hillside after hillside – stubbled with match-stick thinness,
like the poor head-hair of chemo patients. In some places
recovery is obvious. Eucalypts have put on sleeves –
pressure bandages on burns victims you hope protects them.
Elsewhere a moss poultice covers the earth, blanketing harm.
No regrowth yet in the banksia forests – sounds are broken
and brittle. Seedpods remain silent. Their mouths will open
eventually, articulate with seed. I’ll trust seeds’ eloquence,
their tumble into the waiting ashbed – kernels of thought
into earth’s imagination. Green is the colour when
the regeneration wheel turns. Shoots will appear, new ideas
nosing their way into life. Already the grass trees thrive.
From burnt beginnings, single, solid spears rear into space,
fields of lingams insisting on existence. The tale of recovery;
I want to be told it again and again, until I have it by heart.