Suzanne Edgar: Four Poems

In Safe Hands

 

A woven blanket wraps me round—

warmth of touch, of sight and sound:

 

songs as you work at the kitchen sink;

you telling me plainly what you think

 

again; a rustle of pages while you read;

the rock of your knee within the bed;

 

the slightest snuffle as you sleep;

your chest for refuge whenever I weep;

 

two old brown shoes, parked on the mat,

what could be more reassuring than that?

 

 

 

 

Klimt in the Courtyard: Woman in Gold

 

Glittering down the tree,

the sunlight on the leaves

is a drift of yellow coins,

a work of art to see

 

as if the slender tree

was a woman dressed in gold

to shine at her soiree

with stylish artistry.

 

 

Double Vision:  Starshine

 

Strange, when driving by the lake one night,

a curve in its elbow opened to show the lights

from street lamps round the bay’s farther shore.

I hadn’t seen them quite that way before,

 

as a replica of van Gogh’s “Starlit Night”.

Although my town is not a place he might

have dreamed, in Arles, beside its little bay,

here were the same reflected lights at play.

 

I’ve always loved his painted starry night

but never thought the real would be as bright

and now I take the curving road when I can,

at night, to honour that unhappy man.

 

In my mind’s eye he’s there beside the Rhone:

cold, and tired, but engaged and quite alone

with the cobalt, ultramarine and Prussian blues

while I stand here and stare, comparing views.

 

His was a wounded life, he died too soon

yet his way of seeing fills my scene: no moon

just water, lamps and stars, their sprinkled light

so festive on a cloudless winter night.

 

 

Red Dirt Stays

 

I like the way it insinuates:

between the toes, in nails and hair

the shirts we wear, our skin,

leaving a stubborn red grin.

How, in semi-arid lands

it chimes with red-winged parrots

and the glinting scarlet gash

on the breast of mistletoe birds.

Red sets hard in dry creek beds

and in the banks of verges,

making walls for mating birds

urged by the wet to breed:

kingfisher and pardalote

drill their nest burrows in.

 

Red bakes hard in the Centre,

held by saltbush and spinifex.

It’s under lakes with salt-crust rims,

on the bleached bones of frail

birds, relic skulls of defeated beasts

and egg-white shells of shrivelled snails.

It’s there, too, on the rusty edge

of cliffs above the turquoise seas

in easy curving bays; in caves

it saves the occult secrets

left from former days.

Iron-hard in iron-rich rocks,

its bony fingers reach and lock,

supervising soft white sand.

 

Tamed and watered, red dirt feeds

the green of mango trees.

After storms it settles down

in grooves on iron roofs

of dying country towns:

against their haywire fences

and tired walls of shut shops.

In the long lonely gutters

and sad forgotten churches

red dirt stays.

Smoking on our wheel rims,

it spins off narrow tracks

all scarred and cut with ruts;

even now, is painted on my eyes.

 

Suzanne Edgar