The Gift

(for Isabelle Claire 16/5/2013)

We took our baby to meet her.

My senile grandmother, lumped

in a corridor of that home, reached

like a bare twig, at this thing

that seemed quite beyond her,

the cocoon which was your mother,

stroking, smiling, not really knowing

what it was she held. And your mother,

so profoundly asleep, as you are now,

never knowing that moment either.

In that half-hour, among the factory noise

of that place, that woman, who in part, passed

on this equivocal gift, and your mother, met

and touched.

Down the corridor there was an eruption of voices

as we stood in that silent room, like the Magi,

lost at the margin of wonder,

and grieving too.

Russell Erwin

The Red Enamel Bangle

(for Emmelise)

This grey day in the full clamp of winter, bright berry,

red berry the eye picks out from a hawthorn’s tangle.

Red breast, blazing breast, a crimson rosella

loud in the cold air, brilliant in its heraldry.

On the galvanized tray of the ute a bead of blood

—from a lamb, fresh-dropped today

until a crow picked life out through an eye.

Why mention this at all? I note a skin

hardening like enamel. Cooling, it clouds over

but the blood’s intense fire still burns.

And I return to a keepsake, a bangle you wore:

of carnations or poppies, their bright red bursting

beneath the cool-sheen surface—an eruption,

such as I felt seeing you in a crowded place,

or now, sharper, remembering, as I go

among ewes and crows in a lambing paddock.

Those flowers that cannot flower, they will not die.

So: this poem, bright with blood, a bloom of love,

keep it, will you, bury it in your heart

no matter how the days cool and harden?

Russell Erwin