PIECING TOGETHER

As large-faced dreams leave me,
I hear a bird's fearful joy.

The light, crushed by cloud
into dullness, shows the sky

never did intend to remain
faithful to its province of blue.

You search for a needle,
and when you find one

hold its eye to the window
and thread it with caution.

It is only now with the light behind
that we learn to read more slowly.

Today we will head south
across plains where sheep the shape of bales

suckle at the water table,
to a levee-town built and steadied

by farmers with huge hands.
Where shelter belts fifty years old

have been axed at the knees.
Where the inevitable green

spreads flush with foothills.
Our love does not need speaking of.

TOM DOOLEY TREE

There was an apple tree
we named Tom Dooley
and we’d sing to it:
Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
hang down your head and cry.

Its bark felt like skin, with a little give.
The apples were large
cookers, red smudged into yellow,
each with its own grub
that when our teeth broke
the apple’s flesh and let in light,
would fall to its knees,
beg for its life.

EVIDENCE

In her eighties when she died
I found no grief evident
in my father's face, his hands
solid and square as garden forks spread
unwavering over the coal range
for the warmth to infiltrate
from fingertip to heart.
His love for his mother then, just a fact
not able to be proved.
Like Good Friday’s sky

remaining its 3.00 p.m. blue
or grey, not the black I expected
of God's old blood
and despite what Father Casey said,
nothing either in the shallow cave
in the clay bank down by the culvert.
No stone rolled away,

no angels bright among the gorse
and on the day after the funeral,
my father back driving the tractor
and whistling through his teeth.

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Tag: Kay McKenzie Cooke