Margaret Bradstock: Two Poems

East Coast by Night

Always driving, in the dark between two places

as though this is a dream

the same journey, which you will wake up from

back at the sign of Pegasus

and all your life before you

drawn on by a clipped-back moon.

Clouds stack and shift on the horizon

past childhood’s forgotten townships

the years between an interval of sleep

the darkness you travel in

to each successive coastline

cold dawn in which you arrive.

Beyond each loss

you stand upon the cliff again

facing a vaster ocean, unshrinkable

caught between thoughts, between stars

outside time, a nameless opiate

as though you might have died

and yet you wake.

Margaret Bradstock

Valley of the Cycads

There are the boys, in their shiny

yellow raincoats, trekking across sand

and riverbeds, dwarfed by

the rocky slopes, the centuries-old

cycads, naked seeding,

growing side by side with palm trees

of the MacDonnell Ranges.

Hooded against the sky, they won’t

remember much of their own journey,

maybe the long bus-trip, but my camera

records it all, the sandstone rocks

with water seeping through

an underground source of survival.

Wind moans through the trees

muffled thunder threatens

another breakup of Gondwanaland,

its Mesozoic forests. What could they tell us

these gymnosperm offspring

about the passing years, the slow slumber

watching generations creep by?

Like the giant cycads, we live and breathe

procreate, may last a hundred years.

I open the old album, made obsolete by

electronic photographs, and the boys

are young again. Still photos

lift from the page, remembered faces

a mixture of sunlight and dust.

How dark the shadows.

Margaret Bradstock