Northern Territory
‘Welcome to country’ the elder says and you look
around you at a land that skimps on shade.
Trees and spindly bushes shun each other
Everything takes its chance in the cindery heat.
‘Welcome to country,’ and they mean it, dance it
for you, as the wind whirls sand in your eyes
and the earth listens out. These people.
They’ve been here for ever. Every rock, every waterhole
speaks of it. Their caves are sweet with ancestry.
And how would it be if you took them back
to your own damp land, to its patchwork countryside?
Fields so green they’d hurt their eyes,
Hedges filled with blackberries and sloes.
Light from a nearby town to block the stars.
Ruth Smith
in collection The Art of Unpicking, 2017, Lapwing Publications,
ISBN 978-1-9108557-3-7
Long Lane Wood
Apart from the patch with the bad-tempered goat
we go where we please, Everyone knows us.
At the shop on the corner we buy liquorice sticks
and a bag of broken biscuits to last us till lunch.
Nearby is the wood. We lay trails in the grass
and rush in and out of the steep-sided crater
made by an enemy bomb. It brought down
the ceilings of all the houses in Mardell Road.
Next to the opening of the wood is a hut.
Fred is there when he isn’t sweeping paths.
Deirdre and I are his friends. He welcomes us in,
hands us sweets. If we fall, he tends our cuts.
When we tell him things he listens to us
and says he can teach us a thing or two.
When no-one’s around he lets us take turns
to ride on the handlebars of his rickety bike.
Sometimes quiet-voiced men come to the hut.
While Fred is scything a patch of long grass
they stand in the doorway with mugs of tea,
watching us cartwheel or skip with a rope.
One day we see someone sitting against a tree.
He calls Come over here! The thing he is pulling
looks like a turkey neck. You can touch if you like.
Deirdre says she has to go home. I say nothing.
I cannot move. My breath comes fast as I’m forced
to look at the man’s awful face as white milk foams.
He throws back his head and gasps. I see Fred
coming along the path, and before he can reach me
I run. When our mothers ask if we went in the hut,
if we saw any men, we never say. But the wood
is cursed. We don’t go there now. I have dreams
I want to run away, but my feet are lead.
Ruth Smith
in collection The Art of Unpicking, 2017, Lapwing Publications,
ISBN 978-1-9108557-3-7
At Lanhydrock House
One summer day I walk into this high, square room,
starched towels on the washstand, a narrow bed,
long view of the gardens, curtains billowing
with each fetch of air. The boy slept here, and then
the man, between the same two palisades of brass.
The rug’s original – nap gone, hints of geometric
flowers, crushed by the press of lowered feet.
The room has been arranged as though he still
slept here, as though the last thing he took up
was that copy of ‘The Field’, as though he’d bite
his pen and dip it in the round silver inkpot,
blotting words when they at last began to flow.
Books line the mantle shelf, the sort of thing
he might have read if he’d had time. A saucer bath
has been brought in and placed beside the fire.
The coat was his. He’s wearing it, fresh-shaven,
monocled, in the oval photograph, (off to the races
or a ball). But now there’s not a single blond hair
left among the ranks of brushes in his dressing case.
When it came back from Loos, his mother laid it
open on the bed, before she locked the room.
Ruth Smith
in collection The Art of Unpicking, 2017, Lapwing Publications,
ISBN 978-1-9108557-3-7
Revenge Tragedy
Wasps in a high buzz, crazy for wood,
flitted through knot holes, wired themselves
onto joists. They spent finicky hours
testing the ply and grain they chewed to a paste.
We listened to them click against the eaves.
Knew they’d be waggling their waists,
docking their wings, to crawl through the door
of a tenement built from spit and pulp.
Wasps, in the kitchen, sampled our jam
then bumbled against the window-pane.
Drinking from wet cloths, they plunged
their stingers into our wringing hands.
Enough! We tied a nozzle to a beam.
Turned on. There was the ploomph, ploomph,
ploomph of them travelling at speed down
the vacuum tube. It went on for hours.
We looked at them singly, sucked mid-flight
into a bag full of dust and matted hair.
The nest went quiet. So did the bag,
unemptied until a light flashed red.
They had festered to a mush. Later
we wondered what they had released.
We could no longer taste nor smell
and when we did, everything was foul.
In the garden, we sipped our noxious tea.
When the reek of the roses sent us indoors
we asked ourselves, Pleasure of life what
is it? Never the silence of the wasps.
Ruth Smith
in collection The Art of Unpicking, 2017, Lapwing Publications,
ISBN 978-1-9108557-3-7
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