Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (University of WA Publishing), won the Mary Gilmore Award in 2014; her second collection was Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). She is currently working on her next collection At the Point of Seeing.

She is also a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University
 
 
 
 
Family Portrait
Van Dyck, c. 1619

In their best Flemish clothes –
                 lace ruffs and jewelry, brocaded fabric –
this young couple gaze
                        intense and hopeful
out of the canvas;
they lean toward me as though
                        all this
were as fast as the shuttering
of a lens;

their bonneted child,
dandled on her mother’s knee,
looks behind and up –
she has no need to look my way;

Her parents are vibrant with
                 youth and prosperity,
their connection to each other,
their pride in the child;

like every family –
                 holy in their ordinariness –
they hold the unfolding generations
squirming
in their richly upholstered arms:
Look! we have made this future –
                 it belongs to us.

Only consider –
(and here the benefit of hindsight)
                 their willingness to pause,
                           to sit while a painter
                                  composes
                           studies
                 takes their likenesses
                           in pigment and brushstroke,
                 placing them
lovingly
                                        within the rushes of time –

Look carefully –
hold fast to the slipperiness of this moment –
it will not always
                 be like this.
 
 
 

From Mallaig

Heaving out from the harbour,
                 its narrow lean of wooden houses,
                           salt-weathered in a cloudy light –

a ferry clanks and judders
                 picking its way past little boats,
                           their tangle of nets

and out into the slap and wash of darkening water:

stink of diesel and fish swim
                           in freshets of air,
rubbing cheeks into ruddiness;

until the hump of island
sails into view –
                 its possibilities of destination,
                           palette of smudged greys and greens
flickering through the glass;

the angular spine of the Cuillins
                 scrapes against
a loamy sky,
writhing in  channels of wind;

while,   deep in boggy fields,
                 something
                           shifts,
restless in peat –

These tannin-soaked fields,
this permeable membrane,
this elongated moment when a boat might
                 clip and ride,
a shoreline in sight.