Russell Erwin: Two Poems

Malaria

“Memories linger in the blood, like malaria”

(Geraldine Doogue, ABC RN, 13/1/18)

There were those little yellow pills he kept

amongst the derris dust and Rogor

out in the garage, which we were frightened

into not going anywhere near.

Why there?

We just knew they were for “Malaria”

and something far-off—“New Guinea”,

“The war”. That it had shook him up

And that was it.

He would never ’ve allowed himself

to lapse into speaking, of anything—

illness, women, slaughter.

We, beyond his life,

are doing his remembering

with a word like malaria

in our blood.

A Quiet Woman

She’s serious? She’s leaving him?

After, what, thirty years? Forty-five?

Good Lord! They must have been young.

Yes, I know … We’re in the catching pen now.

So, is it because she was out there all those years

that it seems such a waste … what she gave? Gave up?

She has her children, grandchildren. Yes.

And it’s not all black and white … I know that.

But … They were her years, her love.

For what? A kite on a string?

Even when he was there he was absent.

I didn’t recognise her

in a photo of their family’s last reunion:

children back from the stilted otherworld of Skype,

bringing their children to be held by a stranger,

to be caught in a winter light at a favourite beach

where in their teens her generation had larked and flirted,

and later, lay down in the accommodating sand hills.

I just didn’t recognise her face.

I saw what a passer-by would—an old woman—

her beauty taken down, now as useless.

Straitened. Yes.

Even so, she, herself,

in the simple gown of her dignity.

Russell Erwin