Roberta Lowing recently graduated with a Master Of Letters from the University of Sydney. Her poetry has appeared in Meanjin, Blue Dog, and Overland journals. For the past four years she has run the monthly PoetryUnLimited Press Poetry Readings and Open Mic Competitions in Sydney. In 2007, she edited PULP’s Ilumina Journal.
North
The past is only just now reaching us
and the last perfect place of exile
is another gateway to the dead
Even when we smelled the blackened hands
of the officials abandoning the capsized tanker
we kept applauding those who cut arteries of rock
and severed the ocean’s silver-scaled veins
We lived at the heart of the crystal
surrounded by ice roses and frosted fossils
we thought we could merely open another door to another north
and the devil would rush by
When the shadows appeared out of that first bruise-coloured dusk
(bird-shaped, seal-shaped) we didn’t listen to the cracking
from the battles of past winters we didn’t realize
our black pages would never be white again
As the graveyard pools washed up on shore
our cliffs were reduced to midnight silhouettes
tendrils of shotgun smoke froze above the slumped bodies
ropes hung rigid from wooden beams in the boat houses
In other places
the land is knocked down by noisy winds
or it murmurs in resignation
as it swells into blurriness after the winter storms
Places that die every winter
are revived by the returning sun
but in Cordova Alaska
there are no new beginnings
We must stand glistening like chandeliers
crystal knots of tears on our cheeks
as the snow
falls burning on our hands
The Country Behind Us
Strangers who drove through Badourie in 1938
must have thought the war already happened:
the bomb to end all bombs had bitten into the flat plain
and hissed out a grey wind, red around the edges.
It must have been more than the sun that bleached
the splitting fences and the cattle ribs that hugged the fissures,
chiselled out the wooden blades of the windmill
so it frowned, gap-toothed, over
the crumbling wattle-and-daub houses, the absence
of children staring from doorways, dogs
rolling their tufted yellow bellies
into the cleft shadow of the rotting porch.
In bullock-breath weather,
the ice gripping the wooden teeth clicks
as it turns under a sky as thin and white
as chalk smeared by a falling hand,
the birds remain blurs on the horizon,
the ground leans away to the summoned faces.
The windmill grimaces as the days descend
with their hammers of sun.
Neda
you lie on your back
in your jeans and headscarf
on your new bed of blue asphalt and red lace
when I rock the developing tray
your arms flail through the wet yellow smoke
under the crimson globe
lapping water is the only sound in my darkroom
but your world reverberates
with beating garbage tin lids
defiant cries from rooftops
the soft hiss as the air divides
for stones flung by desperate students
we are satellites apart – the chemical smell
that bites my nostrils comes from your world –
but as I place the tongs over your heart
it seems we are the ones running through smoke
chased by razor-wielding men
in black helmets on black unmarked motorbikes
my hands are still
but you keep moving
sending out your indissoluble ripples