Jamie Grant: Two Poems

The Written Word

The spoken word can sometimes be forgotten,

but phrases carefully set out in hard

clear script, once written, can never be unwritten.

Thus, at the end of a marriage, and at the end

of more than two decades, a wife presented

her soon-to-be former husband

with a children’s exercise book, in which

all of his offences against her had

been recorded, set out in each

case in careful handwriting, where an instance

would be underlined, sometimes, and linked

by arrows or stars to a previous offence,

such as: November 20. Late to come

home, without notice which was connected

to: Once again did not come home,

the two examples being more than ten years

apart. The infractions he remembered

clearly: office functions, with beers

and the last train missed, and he knew as well

that his guilt was never to be questioned,

nor would it have helped to tell

her that most of the crimes were trivial:

Dishwasher—again—incorrectly stacked.

Accumulating over several

years, they had assumed the weight of scripture.

The pages were clean, uncluttered and lined.

There was a kind of rapture

of hatred in every black ruled line.

Yet all that he had wanted, he explained,

was to give her happiness. No crime

however diligently recorded

ought to outweigh, he considered,

the sincerely intended

kindness behind every inadvertent sin.

For her, however, his intentions carried

no weight. Everything was in

the book. The written word amounted to proof

and could not be contradicted.

A black and white bird on the roof

its plumage the colour of print

cried out in a voice like a child

its eyes hard as polished flint.

Jamie Grant

 

 

 

Wind Farm

 

Propellers of an oversized aircraft

planted above the shoreline

 

the blades turn over

slowly as the hands of a clock

 

mounted on windowless towers

tall as lighthouses

 

and glossy as a jetliner.

Seen from a distance

 

the towers bristle

like the spines of an anteater

 

or like the white dead

tree trunks

 

left over the hillsides

by a bushfire;

 

closer up

they reveal

 

artistic curves

and marble-smooth textures,

 

pure as sculpture;

they could be the icons

 

of a long-lost

religion, or goal-posts

 

of an obscure

sport, no longer played.

 

Visitors from the future

may wonder at them,

 

as we wonder

at those giant

 

Easter Island statues,

not seeing their purpose

 

as the latest expression

of humanity’s

 

centuries-old dream:

a workable

 

perpetual

motion machine.

Jamie Grant