CIRCLE OF FIRE

 

It’s not that I didn’t know the danger

but I drove on anyway through the dark,

torrents pissing down.

It’ll only get worse, I thought,

and I needed to get home,

so, I gunned the engine.

 

I’d reached where the road takes a turn

just before Fred’s farm

and suddenly my truck was floating,

well, sinking actually, water rising 

through the cabin floor,

so much water that the electricals all failed.

 

Scared shitless.  I couldn’t get out:

water was lapping my waist

and would soon be at my chin.

My satellite phone still worked – a miracle

and Fred answered – another miracle.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

 

I had no idea what he would do.

He’d brought a semi-automatic, of all things.

I wondered if he was going to finish me off!

“Mind out!” he urged.  He shot through the roof –

a circle of fire – like opening

a can of beans with a screwdriver.

 

I crawled out, weeping, and shaking.

“You’re a bloody stupid bugger!” he said.

 

“Yeah,” I breathed, “and a lucky one, too!”

 

PARALLEL

 

Milk of morning mist flows slowly

among the sandstone cliffs,

nourishing them in silence.

Morning slows,

and the mist loses form,

fading like a gentle memory.

 

In winter the milk flows freely

as liquid ambers lose their leaves.

Roads disappear beneath its shroud.

Mist’s heavy sibling, fog, arrives.

Come evening and the shadows climb

escarpments as they fall asleep.

 

The traveller's journey starts 

with mother's milk

scales the valley's walls in youthful strength

and ends in rest at dusk

in long and deep ravines.

HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO

 

It was how her right hand slipped from mine,

while she clung to the ladder with her left

as the chopper lifted

that became the nub of my nightmares.

 

We found her in Vũng Tàu

at battle’s end – hiding in my tent –

a tiny, shivering kid,

poorly clad.

 

In halting English, she told us

her family was dead.

She’d watched from the sidelines,

saw our paramedics work – and followed them.

 

Months in that apocalyptic jungle

and two mates had adopted dogs.

None had nurtured kids:

we kept her out of sight and fed.

 

Decades later after surgery in Sydney,

I woke woozy in Recovery.

Dr. Van, my surgeon, grasped my hand –

though I’d not met her pre-op.

‘We didn’t let you go,’ she smiled.

 

It was her –

then she was gone.

HANDS

 

I saw Gary’s hands when I was ten:

he taught me Sunday School.

He was a newly minted doctor:

I liked his gentleness and purpose

and wondered

what he might become?

 

His hands had soft black hair.

At home in bed that evening

I looked at my hands and

imagined them like Gary’s,

traced where the hair might grow.

I wondered, what would I be by then?

 

I took the medical path,

served briefly with the church in PNG.

Having seen what could be done

with jabs for whooping cough,

hygiene for gastro,

I moved to public health.

 

In time, my hands resembled Gary’s,

but now my hair is lost.

Game’s played; the score struck –

the sum of wins and losses.

My coin’s in the offering plate,

lesson’s done. Until next week.

SECOND WAVE

We planned to mark her birthday –

and visit her in her filing cabinet,

with its gracious gardens,

dim corridors of old-aged aromas

of faeces and this morning’s food,

groans and occasional cries from rooms.

This place had been her home

since her vision failed

four summers past.

There was nothing that grandma Jenkins didn’t see

despite her blindness, sensing precisely

changes in size and shape of family members,

alterations in tone of voice and itemising these

with the wit of wicked teasing

shifting the focus from herself

onto others to whom she had donated

genetic material, across three generations.

When we bade farewell,

her face – half smile, half sad – 

was a picture of the reverie of age.

Outside the littlest of our clan waved

goodbye, through her window

a gesture relayed to her by a carer:

she smiled and returned the sign.

Weeks later we returned

when the plague was active

and the filing cabinet was locked.

We could not visit or touch

and were confined outside.

She had the virus and was teetering,

short of breath and weak. 

We mourned among ourselves:

then the littlest who had waved before

wanted to wave again. This was arranged.

Soon to depart for other worlds,

grandma Jenkins was supported by a carer in a space suit.

A weak hand appeared at the window

together with a faint smile.

“That was my second wave!” the little one exclaimed,

in triumph as we drove home.

TO THE POINT

The US is a mess.

…….

MORTAL INSECURITY

Observe how sanitised an age

we’ve lived in – where death occurs

toward the natural end.

People slip away:

the mourners given therapy

to return smiling to their work.

It was not always thus

and even now, in slums and camps,

young die by thousands, day and night.

This was how it was when Rembrandt

was painting portraits of himself

that did not disguise the prevalence
of omnipresent death.

Now, fear has lifted scales from our eyes.

Three of us, my age, asked at lunch,

“Would we all survive”?

When eventually we revisit galleries

of paintings from before the 19^th century,

with their depictions of death and loss,

we will feel that we are in familiar territory –

The paintings have not changed

– we have.