A girl imagines she could jump.
Despite a window in place,
and four metres of space.
Still, she imagines.
Above her,
the noise is –
Leaking.
Through his head
phones he can hear –
it.
It’s not quite a buzz –
he can hear it even though
it’s not quite a buzz and
He’s wearing his headphones and
it’s leaking.
The girl adjacent wants you to
Please excuse the pun.
As she speaks, the room
cannot find the pun.
Yet,
The room does not exist
but for his eyes,
Thinks a boy as he
lets his hand fall,
between their two chairs.
The man in the corner pulls at his hair
because he is looking at the girl looking
at the window
imagining she could jump.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Swaying gently,
Solidly moored by a vast civilisation of roots below.
Generations of growth and decay,
Growth and decay.
Life goes on for the Eucalypts.
Slivers of bark
Suspended by svelte branches.
Slender limbs macabrely examine their former skin.
An ashen pallor to the trunk,
Smudged shades of grey and green and blue and white
By the brush of Albert Namatjira.
The ghost gum stands tall and straight on this plane and in the next.
For want of water, nurture and relief,
Pines and Firs and Oaks will wither and crumble
Under the golden sun in the red dirt of the Lucky Country.
Far from home.
Something so pale and so spindly
Should succumb to the will of the colonisers.
Nature should bend to man’s will.
And yet in my lifetime and the next, the Eucalypt is well rooted.
I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to throw a frying pan at my brother’s face in the middle of an argument, but six months later, as he visits Sydney from Melbourne, all I feel is love and the urge to give him a hug. How could my feelings for him have changed so dramatically? Was our reconciliation just a matter of time?
As my rollercoaster feelings about my brother have taught me, time is a powerful phenomenon. It is the natural path that allows reconciliation between individuals or groups. My personal guru, Justin Bieber, asks for forgiveness and reconciliation in his renowned song Sorry: “Yeah, I know that I let you down, is it too late to say I’m sorry now?” In fact, as I could tell Justin personally, it is never too late to say you are sorry, rather you just have to give the person you’re apologising to enough time to be able to accept your gesture of reconciliation. In contrast, seeking reconciliation hot on the heels of an argument is never a good idea. That’s when you really could end up with a frying pan in the face. Time allows the sting of hurt to fade. Our memories, especially of pain, don’t linger. I remember the sharp flame of the anger I felt towards my brother, but now it is distant, dim. Just a memory with no power.
Almost every adage about reconciliation expresses the common wisdom that ‘time heals’, just ‘give it time’ and ‘time softens the blow’. But why is time such a powerful healer? How does it help reconciliation? It’s more than just forgetting. Having time allows one to reflect, and this can lead to acknowledgement to take responsibility for our own part in the hurt that has occurred. This recognition is the first step to reconciliation. When storm clouds are closing over a relationship, time is the light that sheds understanding on a situation.
In Gwen Harwood’s poem, Father and Child, time plays an interesting but key factor. It is clear in I Barn Owl that the father and child share a relationship lacking in trust as the child secretly “crept out with (the) father’s gun”. However, in II Nightfall, as forty years have passed, the child reflects on the relationship, fondly stating: “what memories pack them home”. Has time allowed them to overcome mistrust and reconcile? Has it cleared the skies over their relationship? Or was there another decisive factor, perhaps the father’s approaching death?
If time was a person, death would be its older sibling. The painful experience of death, as the end of time, has the ability to force reconciliation as an imperative, in a way that time does not. Infinite amounts of time allow for an infinite number of future opportunities for reconciliation. Death marks the last and ultimate deadline for this opportunity, creating a strong incentive for forgiveness before it is too late. But why does this urge occur? We are taught at a young age, from the classic Disney movies, that there should always be a happy ending at the close of every story. Cinderella forgives her evil step-sisters, before riding into the sunset with a prince. Perhaps from childhood we subliminally believe this fairy-tale message that being generous, forgiving and reconciling with those who’ve hurt us means we might be rewarded, maybe with a prince?
When facing the end of a life’s story, with death, the concept of a happy ending through reconciliation finds expression in popular psychology as ‘closure’— the healing or conclusion to a personal loss or trauma. Why leave the story unfinished with loose ends? In terms of reconciliation, one simply needs closure to be satisfied, otherwise the pain of death is all-consuming.
However, maybe it isn’t time or death but our primal need for social interaction that allows reconciliation to occur? Ultimately if we didn’t crave connection, we would have no compulsion to reconcile. Relationships are too complex for tensions not to arise – and so we are constantly having to resolve this. If I wasn’t able to forgive my brother for always dipping his fingers in my tea, my parents would have to celebrate two separate Christmases. Humans need family; we need friends and partners in order to be happy in life. Reconciliation isn’t always motivated by love; it could be the result of our innate fear or anxiety of being alone. We have to be able to reconcile, or else we would live a solitary, and sad, life. The lonely storm cloud in a sky of blue: separate and distant.
Ultimately, regardless of why reconciliation occurs, it is a self-determined process. In Father and Child, the mistrust between the two protagonists are relatively minor, or at least able to be overcome in their eyes. But would that be true if their relationship had suffered a more serious wound? It is up to the individual to decide whether the relationship is worth reconciling; to decide whether the problem is forgivable, or even if they have the will. Do they want to wake up to blue skies instead of grey? I always forgive my brother, knowing that within 24 hours of him being home he will wind me up again. I reconcile with him on the understanding that even if his behaviour is unlikely to change, it is more painful not to be reconciled. The feeling of connection provides an embedded metaphysic map to reconciliation. Perhaps every relationship is a series of betrayals and reconciliations.
Reconciliation helps an individual progress their identity, and better understand themselves and others. Like most things in life, reconciliation is a learning experience and a choice, irrespective of the factors that contribute to it.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
I’ve been staring out this window my entire life
I see the same people and hear the same sounds
Blending into one beautiful terrifying shape
Breathing and sweating and crying
Waltzing in time with each beat of the day
The mechanical stream of what is and what isn’t
The blood and the veins of a living picture show
Peering into me as I try to contain it
This window never cracks
Although it may dirty
For months at a time without a polish
Where the figurines have no faces
And the hymns they sing are anguished
Where the sun runs away
And the sky is unfinished
The motions go on
Against better judgement
As I swim into my twentieth year
The window opens
More than ever before
And the beings and trees are angrier
Yet so loving and warm and tender
This window endures
To scold and to liberate
Embracing all grace and imperfection
Beyond the fragile prison of my mind
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
we hold an indifference to each other’s lives,
the tattooist and i.
he held my arm and
he held my gaze and
still, he remained indifferent.
Noah in love
We drove over the speed limit and I thought of religion.
We skipped a song (twice) and I thought of you (twice).
Noah by the sea
moses and i have heard
of seas splitting
like an arrow
down the middle of a party
at the end is –
at the end is a pair of dead rabbits,
two drowned elephants and
brown eyes.
glazed,
like a ham.
Noah in love, part 2
bad poetry is made worse with the overuse of lowercase / denial of uppercase.
Noah in shower
Tonight in the shower I could breathe my own name.
I breathed out first.
n – o.
I held my breath; there, at the pit of my stomach, and
I waited for my brain to play your name
So many times over that it lost all meaning.
Read the companion piece here
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
Noah shook her head and sparks leapt off the ends of her hair. I could see them falling from across the room. They fell like fireworks and the cold in the air snuffed them out before they reached her shoes.
The girl speaking with Noah couldn’t see them. She was distracted by something, her mind eating up everything else in the room but Noah. The girl’s friends were gathered around the kitchen, talking to a boy. Her boy. The room held little bundles of people, all of them wishing to be in the next bundle over. But Noah didn’t seem to notice. She was never a good conversationalist. I could recite just about every conversation we’d ever had, they felt so nice, but that doesn’t mean she was good at conversation. She hid this fact by sipping her drink mid-sentence, relishing in the pauses this created. Anything to prolong her train of thought, anything to keep the other person mesmerised by her words. From across the room I could almost see the perspiration on her upper lip as she tried to make her language something magical. She was always too forced; too obvious; too far away from the person opposite. Someone should tell her that.
Still, the room orbited around her nucleus. Still, it seemed like the party was pulsing for her. Sitting by myself, on a fraying couch at the frayed edges, it seemed as if each post-teen, pre-adult, Converse-clad person in the room was a prop to Noah’s play. They greyed in comparison.
Now, the girl was training her eyes towards the boy, purposefully turning ignorant to Noah. She’d catch on soon; when she reached the end of her sentence. She’d catch on. It’s not like she couldn’t read people. I watched as, on cue, she let her last phrase fall out of her mouth. It lay squirming between them on the floor; a gap in the conversation.
The girl looked down, realising what Noah had done. She smiled gratefully at her before running over to her boy. He grinned smugly as she approached, knowing he could pull the girl across the room just by standing in it. And then Noah just stood there next to the fireplace, not even bothering to pretend that she hadn’t been left alone. I watched as her head circled the room, lazily. The sparks lit up slower this time, fizzing out as they fell past her shoulders. Her nonchalance was suffocating. She would only ever notice other people retrospectively, when she was finished with her own thoughts.
—
The first time we met it had been hot; the sky was the kind of heavy that smothered any suggestion of romance or affection and still I had stared at her. Her hair was longer then, down to her waist, and it lit up as she circled through the school yard. She was placed next to me in class. When she looked at me, I felt myself being swallowed up by the wall behind me. The first time she spoke to me, it was to ask how to spell the word ‘disintegrate.’ D-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-e, I had replied. Di-sin-te-grate, she had said back, placing emphasis on sin. And then she laughed her strange, hollow laugh and our descent into romance began.
By the time that her love for me had started filtering through the layers of her mind, my love for her had already begun pooling at my feet. It leaked through the doors of her dad’s car as we drove over the speed limit down the highway, and my parents could smell it on me as I sat down to dinner each night. Walking through the city to go to the movies, or to the shops, she would hide our clasped hands behind her back. My heart swelled at our secret. When my desire to share us with the world got too much to bear I would draw the outline of her mother’s dress, of her makeup brushes, of her bed frame. One time, my art teacher stood behind me as I drew.
“Oh Abigail! How wonderfully violent,” she exclaimed, rolling her eyes at another tortured teenager in love. Three months into knowing Noah, I had memorised her moods, the times of day she liked to be alone, the moments before she retreated. I loathed those stretches of retreat, where her eyes glazed over and her mind shut itself off to the world. But I would persist; I stayed watching her and talking to her and touching her until she closed off completely and I could taste my aloneness. That’s what defeated us in the end; what di-sin-te-grated us. My aloneness. Her aloofness.
—
Eight months later and Noah was standing by the fireplace, her phone open to the notes app. I could tell by the way that she was typing and then pausing, typing and then pausing. She was writing a poem. It would go like –
My parents died today
Or so my empty house said.
Mother hanging in the laundry
And Father facedown on the bed.
Or perhaps –
The Wind howled and
roared at the sea and the
Sea roared back.
Later that night, she would sit at the edge of her bed, her hair glowing. She would have her phone on one knee and her notebook on the other, and she would copy the poem down under today’s date. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she didn’t do that anymore. I suppose it didn’t matter where she kept her poems. They weren’t any good now that they weren’t about me.
Read the companion piece here
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
You will love people who don’t love you
Hold friends close and then greet like strangers
Have chatter and laughter and nights all alone
Capricious tuition and shiny ball pens
This chapter begins where your old news ends
Leaving home is for big kids
So take your time
Listen to the lightning and the chaos
Every wonderful sound
There is choice and there is reason
Purpose in all change
Now is the moment
Where the world is more open
To nurse you and to hurt you
To teach you and propel you
Out toward the lights you cannot see
Into the life that has not yet formed
When my mother left there was fire –
The air ripe with the wrong things; tears, skin, fear
Feet bolting down dirt roads going nowhere
Liberty caged
Beyond the reach of black and brown hands
Too close and too far
Onto a boat and into the New World
Where the sky went on forever
Colour and space
Gumtrees
Birds that laughed and sang
Tires screeching down brand new highways
Shock
Adaption
Light
The old home sits there still
My mother’s first love
Beauty without warmth
Death with no birth
It beckons
Bleeds
But that story is over
Life is freer
And she is here
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
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We sat around in 40 ̊C
in our underwear
and fan
and a wet cloth
over the fan
and cubes of ice
in our mouths.
So many love songs
about keeping
each other warm, but
so few
about keeping
each other cool
in this fucking heat.
I’m sweating
thru my balls. It’s
a real prick.
You can take em
off.
I did /
was
naked now.
It was not
a pleasant
or a graceful sight.
But you didn’t laugh
and you didn’t even
look twice.
Sometime
after that
you got it all
off yrself.
3 hrs
we sat there
watching
Passion of
The Christ.
We didn’t
even fuck.
But let me
assure you—
this
this is
this is a love poem.