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

Common or Garden Poets

An Introduction to 

Common or Garden Poets

Common or Garden Poets is an open-ended and ongoing Flying Islands Poetry Community initiative. It’s a conversation in poetry, of any kind; poetry, in some way, concerning the garden.

It’s a very simple project. Here’s how it works.

We come into this garden of letters one at a time. That means one poet invites a next by way of dedicated words. I'll invite Jean Kent, to kick things off, in a post to follow this one.

Once you have been invited to join the common or garden poets you may contribute as often or as rarely as you like. The important thing is to pass the invitation on to one more poet so that the garden grows with new voices.

We’ll post these draft poems here on the THESE FLYING ISLANDS blog and also on fb, and possibly elsewhere. There’s no telling how this garden may grow.  

 

kk

Oh Terrific

So now they tell me business is business, sometimes up sometimes down that's the breaks, it's just how it crumbles so many sayings, turnoff tropes to suppress the outrage to discount further cheap antics, the raw peeling of layer under layer of ripoff, of ruin: "Not to worry she's dancing in heaven" we look down at this morning's leftovers while upstairs, hammers clunk clumsily on a project going 7 years, maybe 9. Now they tell me.