Graeme Hetherington: Three Poems

 

Gaol-Bird

 

I tracked a bird’s broad arrow-print

Around the bay to where it lay,

Crane, heron, or an egret near

Beached fishing boats, neck wrung to judge

 

From its head lolling back the front.

Then I chanced on and scared its mate

That rose into a tree to watch,

Coldly return my heart-felt look

 

Of sorrow, till away it flew

And I was left, a member of

A killer-breed to feel its scorn

For my apology for life,

 

The nature of existence, yet,

Descended from a class that wore

The same sign as its foot-mark, I

Thought also that we should be friends.

 

 

 

Beach Walk, Binalong Bay

 

A woman with a cut bruised face,

Perhaps from a “domestic”, has

Gone limping for a swim and left

A man to hold her clothes and wait,

 

To kick in a confusion of

Embarrassment, atonement, rage

The sand while scowling sideways from

Beneath a lowered brow at me,

 

Endangered chance witness to his

Emotionally explosive mix.

Afraid to pass I pause and gaze

Fixedly out to sea, pretend

 

I’m unaware he’s struggling to

Keep the lid on. But tension builds

And he lifts it, moves towards me,

Just having hurled his armful at

 

Her coming from the briefest dip,

Brushes provocatively close,

And still not getting me to look

Storms off snarling “fuckin’ coward!”

 

 

 

Dance of Death: Binalong Bay

 

Walking one night across a soft,

Treacherously uneven beach,

Jarred, shaken up to the extent

Of impending dislocation,

I felt my skeleton was on

 

The brink of getting out, though not

Cleanly and smoothly, all at once,

But bit by bit, obtruding like

A sharp-edged, ragged patchwork quilt

Of rock from underneath sand it

 

Was not able to quite throw off.

As Hamlet couldn’t thaw and melt,

Dissolve his flesh into a dew

And had to stay, partially at least,

Encumbered and in tatters dressed,

 

Mine too would not permit a dance

All neat and tidy in one piece

With moonlight starring elbows, knees

And other angularities,

Finally to take a bow and fall

 

Together in a compact heap.

It was, rather, to be a mess,

A widespread scattering of bones

In keeping with the life I’ve led,

Mostly in mental anarchy,

 

Freebooting as a canon on

The loose in countries round the globe,

Disoriented, dispossessed,

A meaningless dispersal save

For poetry that structures me.

 

Graeme Hetherington