Flint Waller

Each morning, he opens his door onto aspens
whispering, the call of woodpigeons, the slow-
surfacing flint; crosses shorn fields, breathing
their starkness, the uncovered silence of stone.
 
His pockets fill. On a bench he spills churt,
releases Neolithic voices chattering.
 
Voices he’d heard before he left grey, biting air,
the scattered rocks, seas with no horizon.
Before the day he’d travelled south towards
farmlands of chalk and clay, the trees
splintering dark against the sky.
 
He hears them again as he works,
knapping each stone, trusting sharp edges,
smoothness held in his palm, creating patterns
from the rust reds, greys, whites, rare greens,
to rival borders of flowers.
 
He listens for echoes,
for cries of battle, for the millennia of lifetimes.
He takes his time, listening.
 

Geraldine Paine

Second prize winner, Roundel Poetry Competition 2014;
published in Links in the Chain, 2017, Lacuna Publishing,
ISBN 978-0-9954648-1-0

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Villanelle for Nancy

     After Charles Dickens
 
Maybe it’s because she’s a Londoner in debt,
she breathes foul air, coiled through with fog.
Like some ectoplasmic invader she’s wet
 
with the night’s left-over sweat,
chilled by the fear of a river’s bogs.
Maybe it’s because she’s a Londoner in debt,
 
clear liquor warms both her and Bet
as they ply the alleyways that swirl and clog.
Like some ectoplasmic invader, she’s wet
 
behind the ears for love, and yet
he knows her for the whore he flogs.
Maybe it’s because she’s a Londoner in debt,
 
she chances carts, full wagonettes,
the clash of horses’ hooves, a scrag-arsed dog,
Like some ectoplasmic invader, she’s wet,
 
soaked through; he’s there in silhouette,
the end is sudden, the heartless epilogue.
Maybe because she’s a Londoner in debt,
like the ectoplasmic invader, it’s kismet.
 

Geraldine Paine

longlisted and published in the Live Canon international poetry competition anthology, 2018

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Immigration Hiring Depot, Fremantle
June 3rd 1850

So this is how it is, bundled into a barn,
like the sheep we’ve become, all of us
dejected, damp to the bone. A puny flock –
filthy bodies, lice, sickness.
 
And who will have us?
The da brought us here
only to lose us.
 
Stand tall missy,
they’re watching.
 
The girl next to me, she’ll be nine or so,
cries fat, greasy tears. Age?
His official boots creak. Far gone
in the hunger, her mammy mumbles
a number. The voice, the boots move on.
 
We may not meet again
among these stone faces,
but I whisper
 
one day, smoke from the west will call us;
and our doors will be open right through,
a bucket of water ready for the little people!
Don’t we carry our homes inside us?
 
Wouldn’t your heart break
to see the child smile?
 
Tis a long way from the soft familiar,
the grey-green of it, before fields bloomed black
and the starving, like crows, flocked over and over.
 

Geraldine Paine

in collection Disappearing Tracks, 2016, Lapwing Publications
ISBN 978-1-9108553-4-8

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E.NE of Mount Kenneth
August 19th 1854

With each day now I’m quick to notice signs,
the woven wattle boughs –
 
a trap laid above a dried-up stream,
figures scored on gum trees, a stony grave
 
disturbed by dogs, the bones of horses
left to die. The land speaks.
 
I shudder, knowing men such as we,
have passed this place before.
 
Tracks disappear in the soupy red loam.
Will we too become part of this land,
 
our dying marked by rocks,
or trees scattered across the plains;
 
every stream, waterhole, blade of grass,
every living creature revered
 
or cursed? Souper and Narryer say little.
We march together and apart.
 
In their steadfastness,
do they pity us our ignorance,
 
or are we the Whitefellas,
to be feared for our fire and shot?
 
At dusk, thickets of cypress and casuarina
are full of whispers, sighing like waves.
 
Some horses, restless, break loose,
search the citrus air for home.
 

Geraldine Paine

in collection Disappearing Tracks, 2016, Lapwing Publications
ISBN 978-1-9108553-4-8

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