Elisabeth Wentworth: Four Poems

A Charter of Human Joys

Someone glad to see you

A warm embrace

Their beloved face.

Old friends around your table

Laughing at a long story

You’ve all heard before.

 

Winter sunshine on your skin

The first, faint whiff of spring

All the words of the song

In your head, at last

And the sound of singing

From the other room.

Elisabeth Wentworth

 

A Comparison of Bullies

What they hated about us most

Was that we did not notice them

Until they brought themselves

To our attention

We were elsewhere, in our own worlds

Unaligned

None of their fear of being alone

We were used to that, necessarily

Self-contained

I think they saw the promise too

And knew

We would overtake them

Soon enough

They glimpsed the gift

That would sustain us

For the rest of our lives

Long after their failure and their loss.

Elisabeth Wentworth

 

Moving up the Rows

When I was a silent child in sixth grade

Sucking in language like milk

From the sounds around me

Storing up words like fat to draw on

When the time came to run

I had a teacher who saw me whole.

 

Double wooden desks in four rows

A craftsman’s hand in the grooves and turns

Bare floors, a blackboard, fresh air through the windows

The sashes propped open in all seasons

We sat straight and faced the front

It seems now such a simple way to teach a class.

 

Miss Cattanach had the old style control

Never smiled or relaxed.

We stayed alert for her slow swivelled stare

Then the sigh—it was enough.

Determined to prepare us for the competitions ahead

She proposed a game that was not a game.

 

Every piece of work she marked with a stamp

A hierarchy of animals, good, very good, excellent

End of the week, add up your score,

Move up a row if you had the most

Move down if the least.

Like a solemn quadrille

The strange, determined rearrangement of children

Continued for months, till we’d all found our places

For the next fifty years.

 

I loved the stamps and aimed for the first row

Towards natural light

Won a scholarship that year, and flew out the window

Leaving silence behind.

 

What did we learn from that solemn streaming?

Some prizes have meaning. Some are not for us.

I suppose the theorists would crucify her now

But I think she knew that she could not save us all.

Elisabeth Wentworth

 

Urban Howl

I’m eight floors up in a hotel room

Hobart seems like a quiet country town,

I might get some sleep, I thought to myself

Six hours ago.

But there’s a nightclub down on the street below

I didn’t notice it, coming in—must have been disguised

In the daylight, as a boring door going nowhere

I would have spotted it otherwise and checked out

Quick smart.

It’s been inhaling and expelling noise all night

Voices rising as the in-mates spill out the door

And stumble on the air

Strange that they think they still have to shout to be heard.

Strike that, ex-mates,

The fights have been with words till now

Cross-cut slurred obscenities missing their mark by a mile

Is it conversation or spew?

The latter I fear from the muffled clues at the edge of the sound

Oh dear

God I need to sleep, and like an answered prayer

The pack moves slowly off down the hill, the voices

Trailing behind them, like dodgy outboard motors

Splutter, nothing, splutter, rooaaarr, then gone.

I drift then wake sharp

Someone is howling. Female. No words.

Full-throated despair I’ve never heard before

Though I’ve felt it once or twice, and feel it now

Rising, falling, all the long vowels, breath sucked in then

The howl resumes, like a psychotic elocution lesson.

I think of Eliza Doolittle while I think what to do

But this woman is real.

As I pull on some none-of-my-business clothes

I realise I have misjudged this town.

Elisabeth Wentworth