Here they are:
10 Mary Street
For nineteen years
We departed
Each morning, shut the house
Like a well-oiled lock,
Hit the key
Under a rusty bucket:
To school and work -
Over that still too-narrow bridge,
Around the factory
That was always burning down.
Back at 5p.m.
From the polite hum-drum
Of washing clothes
And laying sewerage pipes,
My parents watered
Plants - grew potatoes
And rows of sweet corn:
Tended roses and camellias
Like adopted children
Home from school earlier
I'd ravage the backyard garden
Like a hungry bird-
until, bursting at the seams
Of me little blue
St Patrick's College cap,
I'd swear to stay off
Strawberries and peas forever.
The house stands
In its china-blue coat -
With paint guaranteed
For another ten years.
Lawns grow across
Dug-up beds of
Spinach, carrots and tomato.
(The whole block
Has been gazetted for industry).
For nineteen years
We lived together -
Kept pre-war Europe alive
With photographs and letters,
Heated with discussion
And embracing gestures:
Visitors that ate
Kielbasa, salt herrings
And rye bread, drank
Raw vodka or cherry brandy
And smoked like
A dozen Puffing Billies
Naturalized more
Than a decade ago
We became citizens if the soil
That was feeding us -
Inheritors of a key
That'll open no house
When this one is pulled down.
Ancestors
Who are these shadows
That hang over you in a dream –
The bearded, faceless men
Standing shoulder to shoulder?
What secrets
Do they whisper into the darkness –
Why do their eyes
Never close?
Where do they point to
From the circle around you –
To what star
Do their footprints lead?
Behind them are
Mountains, the sound of a river,
A moonlit plain
Of grasses and sand.
Why do they
Never speak – how long
Is their wait to be?
Why do you wake
As their faces become clearer –
Your tongue dry
As caked mud?
From across the plain
Where sand and grasses never stir
The wind tastes of blood
Feliks Skrzynecki
My gentle father
Kept pace only with the Joneses
Of his own mind’s making –
Loved his garden like an only child,
Spent years walking its perimeter
From sunrise to sleep.
Alert, brisk and silent,
He swept its paths
Ten times around the world.
Hands darkened
From cement, fingers with cracks
Like the sods he broke,
I often wondered how he existed
On five or six hours’ sleep each night –
Why his arms didn’t fall off
From the soil he turned
And tobacco he rolled.
His Polish friends
Always shook hands too violently,
I thought… Feliks Skrzynecki,
That formal address
I never got used to.
Talking, they reminisced
About farms where paddocks flowered
With corn and wheat,
Horses they bred, pigs
They were skilled in slaughtering.
Five years of forced labour in Germany
Did not dull the softness of his blue eyes
I never once heard
Him complain of work, the weather
Or pain. When twice
They dug cancer out of his foot,
His comment was: ‘but I’m alive’.
Growing older, I
Remember words he taught me,
Remnants of a language
I inherited unknowingly –
The curse that damned
A crew-cut, grey-haired
Department clerk
Who asked me in dancing-bear grunts:
‘Did your father ever attempt to learn English?’
On the back steps of his house,
Bordered by golden cypress,
Lawns – geraniums younger
Than both parents,
My father sits out the evening
With his dog, smoking,
Watching stars and street lights come on,
Happy as I have never been.
At thirteen,
Stumbling over tenses in Caesar’s Gallic War,
I forgot my first Polish word.
He repeated it so I never forgot.
After that, like a dumb prophet,
Watched me pegging my tents
Further and further south of Hadrian’s Wall.
In the folk museum
A darkness in the rooms
Betrays the absence of voices,
Departing from steps
And veranda rails –
On to a street that leads around Autumn
Which stands at the door
Dressed in yellow and brown.
I look at words
That describe machinery, clothes, transport,
A Victorian Bedroom –
Hay knife, draining plough,
Shoulder yoke, box iron:
Relics from a Tablelands heritage
To remind me of a past
Which isn’t mine.
The caretaker sits
Beside a winnowing machine
And knits without looking up –
Her hair’s the same colour
As the grey clay bottle
That’s cold as water to touch.
In the Town Hall next door
They sing to Christ
Of the Sabbath Day and the Future of Man.
I try to memorize
The titles of books
While “Eternity, Eternity”
Is repeated from a reader’s text.
The wind taps hurriedly
On the roof and walls
And I leave without wanting a final look.
At the door the old woman’s hand
Touches mine.
“Would you please sign the Visitor’s Book?”
Migrant hostel
Parkes, 1949-51
No one ever kept count
Of the comings and goings
Arrivals of newcomers
In busloads from the station
Sudden departures from adjoining blocks
That left us wondering
Who would be coming next
Nationalities sought
Each other out instinctively
Like a homing pigeon
Circling to get its bearings
Years and place names
Recognized by accents
Partitioned off at night
By memories of hunger and hate
For over two years
We lived like birds of a passage
Always sensing a change
In the weather
Unaware of the season
Whose track we would follow
A barrier at the main gate
Sealed off the highway
From our doorstep-
As it rose and fell like a finger
Pointed in shame or reprimand
And daily we passed
Underneath or alongside it-
Needing its sanction
To pass in and out of our lives
That had only begun
Or were dying
Postcard
1
A post card sent by a friend
Haunts me
Since its arrival –
Warsaw: Panorama of the Old Town
He requests I show it
To my parents.
Red buses on a bridge
Emerging from a corner –
High-rise flats and something
Like a park borders
The river with its concrete pylons.
The sky’s the brightest shade.
2
Warsaw, Old Town,
I never knew you
Except in the third person –
Great city
That bombs destroyed,
Its people massacred
Or exiled – You survived
In the minds
Of a dying generation
Half a world away.
They shelter you
And defend the patterns
Of your remaking,
Condemn ypur politics,
Cherish your old religion
And drink to freedom
Under the White Eagle’s flag.
For the moment,
I repeat, I never knew you,
Let me be.
I’ve seen red buses
Elsewhere
And all rivers have
An obstinate galre.
My father
Will be proud
Of your domes and towers,
My mother
Will speak of her
Beloved Ukraine.
What’s my choice
To be?
I can give you
The recognition
Of eyesight and praise.
What more
Do you want
Besides
The gift of despair?
3
I stare
At the photograph
And refuse to answer
The voices
Of red gables
And a cloudless sky.
On the river’s bank
A lone tree
Whispers:
“We will meet
Before you die.”
St Patrick’s College
Impressed by the uniforms
Of her employer’s sons,
Mother enrolled me at St Pat’s
With never a though
To fees and expenses – wanting only
“What was best”.
From the roof
Of the secondary school block
Our Lady watched
With outstretched arms,
Her face overshadowed by clouds.
Mother crossed herself
As she left me at the office –
Said a prayer
For my future intentions.
Under the principal’s window
I stuck pine needles
Into the motto
On my breast:
Luceat Lux Vestra
I thought was a brand of soap.
For eight years
I walked Strathfield’s paths and street,
Played chasings up and down
The station’s ten ramps –
Caught the 414 bus
Like a foreign tourist,
Uncertain of my destination
Every time I got off.
For eight years
I carried the blue, black and gold
I’d been privileged to wear:
Learnt my conjunctions
And Christian decorums for homework,
Was never too bright at science
But good at spelling;
Could say The Lord’s Prayer
In Latin, all in one breath.
My last day there
Mass was offered up
For our departing intentions,
Our Lady Still watching
Above, unchanged by eight years’ weather.
With closed eyes
I fervently counted
The seventy-eight pages
Of my Venite Adoremus
Saw equations I never understood
Rubbed off the blackboard,
Voices at bus stops, litanies and hymns
Taking the right-hand turn
Out of Edgar Street for good;
Prayed that Mother would someday be pleased
With what she’d got for her money –
That the darkness around me
Wasn’t “for the best”
Before I let my light shine.
