Common or garden poets #9 Morgan Bell inviting Jan Dean

 

The Grave

For Jan Dean

 

“the zucchinis are King Midas

withering in their own liquid gold”

 

Magdalena Ball, ‘False Promise on Petals’

 

a backyard is a cemetery.

there are tiny bones down there.

bones of birds and mice and skinks.

each year they subside further

into the sandy soil.

 

if you were buried there,

the way you wanted to be,

all that would be left of you

in one hundred years

would be your teeth and some nylon thread.

 

you will always be

that sole cigarette ember

on a summer night

blending into the wilds of the garden you planted

behind a sentinel of spiders

Morgan Bell

Video premiere - December 19th...

To mark the soft launch of this year's 8 titles and to give fellow poets and poetry lovers a taste of the work contained within we have timed the premiere of 4 videos (and any others received between now and the 19th) on the Flying Island Youtube channel for the evening of December 19. Details of the Premieres are as follows:

Anna Couani                     "Glebe Local"  (from 'local' )                                              5.45pm

Sarah St Vincent Welch    "Topographies" (from 'chalk borders')                      6.00pm

Brian Purcell                      "Westerly at Bongil Beach" (from 'The Leaving'       6.15pm

Alan Jefferies                      "Only spring" (from 'in the same breath')                6.30pm

Please be sure to tune in and as always... Like, share and subscribe!

Flying Islands Youtube

Common or garden poets #8 Magdalena Ball inviting Morgan Bell

False Promise on Petals

For Morgan Bell

'Train your eye

slalom through sunset webs

Learn quickly.'

 Gillian Swain, "Garden Poem"

Evening pours in 

taking everyone by surprise. 

It’s always the way

heavy and wet, dirt flowing 

like everything you ever needed

but too much all at once

the zucchinis are King Midas

withering in their own liquid gold

potatoes are corrupted, their broken bodies

purple gemstones, bleeding into the earth

cucumbers fall too early off the vine, nourishing

only thriving fungus in mottled shades of grey.

I am also bleeding in, my body in a state

of change, loosened by deluge.

I have always been rain, a false promise

petal softness, cascading down down

into roots dissolving. 

Common or garden poets #7 Gillian Swain inviting Magdalena Ball

 

Garden Poem  

 for Magdalena Ball   

                                                                                                             ...today the purple

                                                                                                                                and the scarlet bells

                                                                                                                 ring in

                                                                                                            Irina Frolova, 'Lightly'

 

­­­Caught up in tangerine

colour like persimmon

 

soft and crumpled

ornamental pomegranate

 

a false promise on these petals

all forgiven.

 

This fiery red

too delightful to mind

 

your step

soft soil after rain

 

slip and sink into this

sweaty spring.

 

All the notes in green

turn and curl

 

hang fresh, new

shadow dance

 

under the canopy

spiders sling afternoon silk.

 

Train your eye

slalom through sunset webs

 

Learn quickly.

 

common or garden poets #6 - Irina Frolova inviting Gillian Swain

 

Lightly

for Gillian Swain

…the garden guides us…

says this is how it feels to be alive

Jill McKeowen, ‘suburban garden song’

 

November’s whites & greys

a melting memory

today the purple

and the scarlet bells

ring in

the summer’s reign

I wander through the garden

between the worlds

of losing

and finding

the jacaranda begins

to fade and scatter

the Flame trees’

fireworks go off

the ground sticky

with fallen blooms

no use fighting

the mess

it will go on and

I give in

to its tenacity

its beauty

this moment

hold it lightly

a snowflake on my palm

I watch it glisten

 melt with

no regret

common or garden poets #5 - Jill McKeowen inviting Irina Frolova

 

suburban garden song

for Irina Frolova

…songs that save us…

…the slow luscious note of gardenias

Kathryn Fry, ‘Impromptu’

 

the koel song has arrived, rolling

from the leafy night

as wattle bird cracks the dawn

step out

to the warming world, crimson

lanterns of bottlebrush lit

in a thousand filaments

 

overnight the young orb

has hung its web, renewal glistening

from awning to gardenia     

on the cusp

of summer, soft as crepe, expiring

waves of perfume

to November’s purple sky

they’ll melt in time to creamy yellow

burn to bronze and fall

like cotton sheets on summer skin

the garden is for being

as we are, a daily practice

not quite finished, and when I’m gone

no-one will know the details

 

how I sit in the dirt pulling weeds

or digging my fingers in

with the planting of good ideas

                                        the garden guides us

through our small mortality

adapting and enduring, says

this is how it feels to be alive

 

like every plant, the human body’s

impulse is to heal while moving

yet toward its end

oblivious

a blue-tongue lizard slides through

the litter of gardenia leaves

and blueberry lily knots

 

at dusk, vermillion cloud vibrates

in each geranium petal disappearing

to inevitable night  

the roots of life

weave with worms and detritus

and insects sing the white moon

for summer’s returning arc

 

Common or Garden Poets #4 - Kathryn Fry inviting Jill McKeowen

 

Impromptu

for Jill McKeowen

 

                                                                            our place in the connectedness of things

                                                                                Gail Hennessy, ‘Our Eclectic Garden’

His hands skip over the piano keys

trilling them as if there’s no weight

in the years we’ve been together,

 

the rhythms of family and garden

by a backdrop of native bush. He sets

the harmony with strong chords, melodic

 

as the orchids and roses in their seasons.

He improvises variations: lunch

by the lillypilly, lorikeets in the grevilleas

 

and birdbath, a grandchild running across

the lawn by bromeliads and ferns,

that haven of shelter for magpies in the heat.

 

O, there’s a familiar cadence, welcome

as a homecoming. How lucky to have

such company, lemon and lavender, ficifolia

 

and cycad, memories from our mothers’

gardens in the breynia and feijoa;

their shape and size and colour are songs

 

to save us. At the end of his impromptu

it’s as if the room overflows

with the slow, luscious notes of gardenias.

Common or Garden Poets #3 - Gail Hennessy inviting Kathryn Fry

 

Our Eclectic Garden

for Kathryn Fry

                                                                           Under the curtaining wisteria

                                                                           who will take banana peel

                                                                           to the orchids? Who will shiver the dew

                                                                          over the freesias and the thryptomene?

                                                                          Jean Kent, ‘In My Mother’s Garden’

 

for every house called home

there is a frame

with you the constant gardener

 

plants are portals into the past

like illustrations from a Book of Hours

 

in Spring

bulbs corms and tubers

push through the earth

purloined cuttings take on new life

 

my grandmother’s ivory freesias

heavy the air with the smell of childhood

my mother’s blood red dahlia petals

open as big as proverbial dinner plates

tree ferns from my brother

uncoil to feather the sky

your mother’s asparagus fern flows against

your ceramic I named ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good’

 

pink azaleas paint

the garden facing the street

to a postcard memory from our student days

Utrillo’s Les Maison Roses

 

in the beginning

friends from Canberra arrived

their car filled

with root balled camellias

to fill the courtyard in winter

with leaf gloss and flower

 

sometimes I change the names

Commander Mulroy becomes Sawada’s Dream

identical camellias white edging to pink

and who wouldn’t be tempted

to swap the military for romance?

 

 

when the nursery was out of stock

Soul Sister became a substitute Julia’s Rose

the name I want to remember her by

 

it’s a league of nations

Chinese Jasmine a pillar of grounded stars

climbs skyward around a verandah post

Callistemon rubs shoulders with Nandina Domestica

 

the front door key waits

for family and friends

under the stone god from Bali

its plinth a home for slaters and worms

 

tiger worms recycle kitchen scraps

you shovel ash from the hearth

I offer coffee grounds to the hydrangeas

 

our Labrador composts

under a camellia holding memories

of his faithful welcome home

a lap of honour circling the clothesline

 

fish laze the pond

in circles of gold

frogs surface to deafen the evenings

 

today we watch the bowerbird

decorating his edifice

squawk and hop

black sheen on the wing

meticulous arranger of blue

clothespegs milk container tops

 

over the back fence

a bushland reserve houses

bandicoots and water dragons

possums blue tongues and owls

the ironic laughter of kookaburras

 

our place in the connectedness of things.

 

 

Gail Hennessy

 

Newcastle Poetry Prize 2021 - five flying islanders shortlisted, two on the prize list

 

Common or Garden Poets - Post #2 - Jean Kent inviting Gail Hennessy

 

In my Mother’s Garden

   for Gail Hennessy

first thing from the veranda

an orchestra tuning
instruments of bright …

Kit Kelen, ‘secret no one can keep’

 

For an hour before dawn a secret bird
practises its song.  Nine notes,
a melody neat

as an artlessly tied silk scarf,
too quicky looped &
flung around the neck of the garden

for its labour to linger in my ear.

In this drowsing twilight my dream –
harrowing empty corridors,
seeding departed rooms
with small hopes of finding my mother—

ends with a bunch of hospital flowers,
a bought garden bright in my hands
but no dented metal dipper like hers

offering a rainwater bath before a vase.

Spangled with spiderwebs her garden
makes mazes now—
narrow pathways with more room
for plants than people.

Under the curtaining wisteria
who will take banana peel
to the orchids?  Who will shiver the dew
over the freesias and the thryptomene?

Who will follow her,
snipping and sniffing and accepting
the riddles of sleeping under earth

and waking seasons later

as if the secret we forget could never be
that we’re just flutter-byes,
brief flittery visitors

to these springs, premature
or predictably passing
in a wink?

Remembering our hydrangeas of childhood,
how patiently they waited for summer
to fill heads with sky-blue

I think of the man in Japan
drowned in tears after the 2011 tsunami,
searching for his family in the Fukushima ruins

until, at last, he planted canola,
a maze of rising sunshine,
a place to be happily lost.

Though it will not last forever,
the light is longer there.
It opens the faces of visitors like secrets

everyone is happy to share.
For this season of flowering, at least,
we all know

if we save the garden, the garden may save us.

 

JEAN KENT

Common or Garden Poets - Post #1 - Kit Kelen inviting Jean Kent

secret no one can keep

 

for Jean Kent

 

 

and now everyone knows

 

it’s the longer light

the mud to life

(a theory once)

 

how dare

and flirt

 

first thing from the veranda

an orchestra tuning

instruments of bright

 

nor anything regular intended

feathers carry word (which isn’t)

 

insects cone up, gyre like motes

 

can’t help the odd paint splash now

flowers all put on a show

 

a riddle in the turning

how we could come to here

 

woody thickets of delve

where nectar

 

parrots in mandarin

brazen sneak

 

glimpse them wing it too

a rite?

 

commence thirst

 

near the zenith

throw cloud by shade

we seek 

and shield the eyes from glare

 

later in the day

burn off last winter piles

 

a season as ever

never before!

 

limber and spit

get your hands on it

 

try a little nakedness now

dance breeze

 

dusk dew welcome

 

it is a week premature perhaps

sprightly and soon sprawl

 

the secret is out

now it’s Spring!

kk