All Clear

A garden door opens. Flowers rush in at her,
leaves pat her with soft hands.
Birdsong swirls in her ears.
 
She’s run the film backwards.
Not this time the final scenes,
bleak farewells, short last journey.
 
Colour is allowed: lilac tree,
orange cat, watercolour poppies
break out of monochrome.
 
No more counting of days, of minutes
as the sun shaft climbs the wall.
She must file her nails, clean the car.
 
Sparrows in the hedge, yellow snapdragons
no longer threats of absence.
Clothes, books, settle back into purpose.
 
Meshed again in birthdays and timetables
she steps out into morning. It flows
full of answered questions.
 
Traffic rolls smoothly. The certainty
of people out on their daily errands,
everyone knowing what they should know.
 

Jane McLaughlin

Commended in Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine
and published in Hippocrates Prize anthology, 2014, ISBN 978-0-9572571-3-9;
in collection Lockdown, 2016, Cinnamon Press,
ISBN 978-9-9108363-1-6

 
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The Rooftop Pool

Posse of long-haul London boys,
let loose above Sydney evening rush;
skinny, daisy-pale, shorts drooping like seaweed.
Reflections of aquamarine water
paint them with bright ripples.
 
‘This pool is unsupervised’
At first they take runs on the Astroturf,
plunge feet first into turquoise water,
explode in zircons, then
make dark shapes in underwater lights.
 
They whoop and tussle. Longer runs
launch into bigger arcs, knees drawn up,
little skynauts over quivering shine.
Their shouts sail down the storeys
into the tangled skeins of white and red.
 
Catapulting higher and further
at each shot, bursting like shells
in fountains of blue radiance
until I am no longer afraid
they will smash their bones
 
on the opposite side of the pool,
but that they’ll fire off into the violet sky,
arms, shorts, dragged back in flight,
hit their crew-cut heads on the Southern Cross,
showering stars like a welder’s torch.
 

Jane McLaughlin

published in ARTEMISpoetry 11, November 2013, ISSN 2045-5686;
in collection Lockdown, 2016, Cinnamon Press,
ISBN 978-9-9108363-1-6

 
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August on the River

The river breeds its own gods, russet-skinned,
blue-skulled, blue-tattooed, circles of sun
in gold around their necks. Big diesels twinned
in the shimmering wake beat a great drum.
Above, the red-rinsed mothers reclining
like goddesses on decks of snow-washed craft.
A pack of Fosters, system loud, the shining
of flying water, diamonds scattered aft.
The nymphs are golden, ponytailed and fair.
White jeans, big earrings, big designer shades.
Their laughter carries on the cooling air
and mobiles chorus as the daylight fades.
Along the banks red charcoal fires glow;
meteors fly, the stars walk bright and slow.
 

Jane McLaughlin

published in Glimmer anthology, 2010, Cinnamon Press,
ISBN 978-1-9070901-7-2
in collection Lockdown, 2016, Cinnamon Press,
ISBN 978-9-9108363-1-6

 
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Learning about Potatoes

On the convent vegetable patch, habit hitched up.
‘These are Edzell Blue’ she says, clearing the violet skins
of mud, clagged by August rains. I remember her holding
them, Inca jewels, digging and teaching.
 
‘You should learn these things. Theirs were purple too,
but yellow inside. The Quechua word is papa’
She’d pile them into the wicker trug, a violet pyramid,
stack the spent haulms on the heap to rot.
 
Then pray to her garden saint, headless St Martin de Porres,
found under the convent hedge. A pot of wallflowers
and a prayer against the Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans.
‘Think now of what you eat, and the million dead.
 
They still turn up bones on my father’s farm.
Food enough for all, but shipped away
to feed foreigners. And they had not a clean tuber
the length of the land. We carry that hunger still.’
 
I remember a Mayo nun in her grey cotton apron
pitching the piled weeds onto the barrow
and crying with the pain of those who lay
where they fell. In the late summer light
 
she digs with the fierceness of one betrayed
by men and seasons, thanks God for her violet potatoes,
holds her trug of Edzell Blue
like a lost child found.
 

Jane McLaughlin

published in Orbis 146, Winter 2008, ISSN 0300-4425 as part of Featured Writer selection;
in collection Lockdown, 2016, Cinnamon Press,
ISBN 978-9-9108363-1-6

 
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