Evergreen by David Malouf

Megan

Mary


At twenty an admirer
of crocus and hyacinth, all
those dawn stars like snowflakes
lighting the grass,
I expected like them
to burn out fast, touch paper
flaring, gone
in a quick blast before thirty.
How else should one live?

And here I am a decade
on from that early death.
Having endured
thirty and the years
beyond, it's the stolid ones, the inchling
head - in - clouds slow - growers
I envy -  turning stars
in their branches, holding
fast to the earth.

It's trees I look for nowadays,
year after year
adding their rings, recording
this month's frost, that season's
burning,  the arrival
and departure of leaves, birds,
mice, barefoot invaders,
and applecore wars
in the kingdom of twigs.

I've discovered an old man's folly,
I'm planting giants :  wych elm,
chestnut, larch, a seed
cast into the next
  long  - shadowed century.
I doze in the
shade of a bunyah pine, its roots
deep in the 1880s,
bubbling with doves.

In its wind - rocked boughs the heavy
green Pacific drowses
and grandfather sets sail
to find us; the tree is
dreaming our lives.
Its dust - thick shadow reaches
the road, and I
swing high on a tide of voices.
Green, green, evergreen.

Who Are My People? by Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

Mary

Megan

Who Are My People?

My people? Who are they?

I went into the church where the congregation

Worshipped my God. Were they my people?

I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.

My people! Where are they?

I went into the land where I was born,

Where men spoke my language...

I was a stranger there.

"My people," my soul cried. "Who are my people?"

Last night in the rain I met an old man

Who spoke a language I do not speak,

Which marked him as one who does not know my God.

With apologetic smile he offered me

The shelter of his patched umbrella.

I met his eyes... And then I knew...

Robert Frost at Eighty by Peter Boyle





Megan

Mary

I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.

I would like to find them.

They are not on the greying paper of old books

or chanted on obscure lips.

They are not in the language of mermaids

or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing.

They run like torn threads along paving stones.

They are cracked as the skull of an old man.

They stir in the mirror

at fifty,

at eighty.

My ear keeps trying to hear them

but the seafront is cold.

The tide moves in.

They migrate like crows at a cricket ground.

They knock at the door when I am out.

I have done with craft.

How can I front ghosts with cleverness,

the slick glide of paradox and rhyme

that transforms prejudice

to brittle gems of seeming wisdom?

Though I bury all I own or hold close

though my skin outlives the trees

though the lines fall shattering the stone

I cannot catch them.

They have the lilting accent

of a house I saw but never entered.

They are the sounds a child hears –

the water, the afternoon, the sky.

I watch them now

trickling through the open mirror.

Sometimes, but almost never

we touch what we desire.