Cally Conan-Davies: Three Poems

From a Place with a View

The world is not falling apart.

The world quickens in disaster.

The world wobbles roundward,

sweeping the highest pasture.

Near Lake Solitude, it slows,

self-righting like a boat.

The world keeps a campfire burning,

though the flame is hard to trust

if you come at it to gloat

or catechise. Come lost.

The world is a world wherein

winged and tendrilled things,

deeper than people are,

will have their way in the end,

and the end will be shift, not disaster.

We all die of wounds, and the sounds

of earthborn death chants rise

to the steadfast scudding sky,

flushing a column of pelicans

trailing torn white clouds,

and crows black as graves.

Shelly Beach Sunday

A girl climbs in the scarred pandanus, a boy

digs a moat in the sand, a yellow sail

glides on the swell, gulls and terns hang

blithe behind the surf, then hit like bombs.

Banksias hold the dunes. The girl in the branches

shouts I am king of the castle, you dirty rascal

and the boy hollows out the shape of his first name.

From a bench on the clifftop carved in memory of

Edwin Edwards, 1918–2007, Enjoy His View

where a southerly onshore wind tangles my hair,

I see light on the water lift all kinds of blue—

nacre making a mirror of the hard world’s edge,

aquamarine in the shallows, sapphire beyond reach.

A tinny pitches on the swell, bow-backed surfers bob.

The lucky ones will catch a perfect break

while those attending to the burning shore,

in the arms of trees, moulding fortresses of sand,

though sun-dazed, stare faithfully at the sea

for a shadow on the blue, dark-fused and not our own.

Child at the Bay of Fires

She squats with her little drum

shaded by a melaleuca,

then runs to the flame-hard

rocks where water bugs skate past

clouds flowing in the pools,

where blunt-snouted blennies dart

among anemones and soft corals,

where the tide combs

and knots the giant kelp,

then drops her heart

murmuring to the bottom of the sea

where it cools by a thousand degrees

the blue glass cities and the gulper eels,

until cracks in the ancient dark pound out

the beat switched on by her brand new

running feet.

Cally Conan-Davies