Poems

Heterotopia


There are ghosts

Of spaces

Like buildings that

Once were bodies, living, present, but now

Decay in stillness and history

Like flowers dripping, saturated by

violent echoes, screams and discord-se

That phantom death of time

A black cat full of secret that brushes

past your hand, your heart

Darkening re-membrance, the eyes of mind

Blurred as truth – strange as transgressor

Purring, attaching you to experience until it

Disappears.

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Eucalypt

Take up and drink from the

sun of the day, take up and

drink from the welling fount

that flows from

victory peering over our horizon,

over that dankness; what shade of Hades

a scent like the stillness of night

left and yet to be revived.


O, Eucalypt, how our daily deaths are like leaf matter

decaying and yet remade in eternity

by your Internal Root


we are leaves off the trunk that is world

- chlorophyllic, swaying with wind

diseased and yet by a grace

you perfume the air

and I, worshiping your source

take my living breath and die

in the faith of the hand that made you.

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Homo Liturgicus


All incarnations of love are driven,

To signify in a moment the liquid sheen of

A silvery glow that lights lips of fire and hearts ablaze

Like lovers who kiss and know their Oneness,

To speak, and sing, and act, and dance, and worship, and make love

But the city falls, it does,

It makes grand temples, that Delphi of beauté si agrandissante,

That keeps us suspended,

Killing the malakoi, and arsenokoites

– Such disgusting bodies, such horrible souls,

Split them apart they cry, split them

In the numb shadows of death

They speak and curse; condemn, nations of normal over us,

In which you buy your carved god or goddess,

You know them with authorial omniscience,

and exploit them,



You enslave your neighbour and yourself with these gods,

The grand arches of their form cast dark over us,

Until the riots pull them down,

The Mind being suspended away from Body,

In enlightening, fiery desires of a dead and maligned spirit

And in the crucible we forge our own science of perfection

Which is our own vanity, Cartesian dreams, all figures of naturalism.

We cry for the salvation of

Deconstruction (I say with a German accent).



But a voice still remains and battles to this Dei,

Imago,

Homo Liturgicus,

I am what I worship,

I love, and therefore I am,

And it speaks, and promises, and relinquishes its love,

To perform what it speaks, and promises in truth

(Unlike Artemis, or Pan or Dionysius or Mammon)

And then it dances, acts, worships, creates and makes love,

All to say (and never in vain) -

“I have just died for you.”

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Le Bosquet pres de Monastère Cimiez



Silence is cushioned

In this grove of falling leaves

Defined by its brown, leafless interior

Housing owls that hoot

Whisper and pray

To stone nuns,

With the white of doves,

They peer into texture serene

Deep olive, like my lover’s eyes

A dark forest of hair above;

His smell musk like pine

A kiss that makes me a

Body again.



I am broken from Him now

This place of the One

Solitude, cool and soothing like

The rain that falls; heavy drops

Through canopy

I find, at the centre

Nature so unqualified

Peering out

To see the sun; ochre and new,

Lighting the green

Grove of day.

Hades' Mountain

We climb it seems,
An incline of sloping dreams,
Boding in time with shimmers echoing,
Dogged spirits fuming up fires,
Eucalypt blue from cooling streams,
Licking dank and enclosing desires.
With the moaning scrape of sandstone – itch,
The coalescing circles of skin – slide
We define the vessel with our mouths,
Relishing its scaly surface, kissing it, sucking it dry,

Until Sisyphus seizes our lips, and possesses their work -
Apparitions, ghost-like and wooden holding us back,
Spilling up from a ferned crevice,
Sexed, taken-in, drenched, wrought and done -
Coming, coming at its peak.
The hole, the dirt, the brain-deadening moment,
Finding nothing in the dark,
But white sensed and once delicious nothing.

A Home Away From Home

Larissa Behrendt – Indigenous Person of the Year

Larissa Behrendt finishes off an email, documents piled up around her, spilling over like the spare contents of her mind. Author of an acclaimed novel, Home and an array of seminal non-fiction works it seems Behrendt has mastered the life of a polymath as both an accomplished writer, and an activist lawyer. Behrendt’s passion for justice first emerged when hearing her grand-mother’s story as a stolen generation child, and the xenophobia and shame her father took on growing up in a country boarding school. As a young lawyer, holding on to the hope of a bright future for indigenous Australians, her views on education and the telling of story as the salve to the problem of indigenous rights were thrown into disarray when the Howard government disregarded the Bringing Them Home Report. From here Behrendt was convicted for a deeper form of change, and went on a search for the root cause.

“Because of my family’s direct personal experience with the removal policy, when Howard’s office said that it is only 1 in 10 that were taken away and that it was for their own good and that it wasn’t genocide it enraged me - I wasn’t going to let the government wipe out the stories of my family,” asserts Behrendt. From the anger experienced in those years, and the struggle of confronting the reality of racism and the indigenous plight in Australia was the important step that led her to diverge from governmental advocacy and her work as a pro bono lawyer to write her first novel, Home. The novel works as a fictional account of Behrendt’s family history, capturing the space between two characters from vastly different eras; Candice, a young rights lawyer, and her grandmother, Garbooli a member of the stolen generation. From this process she has developed an out self-confidence and an inner biography of both the nation she emerged from and the one that exists today.

As part of the process of writing and before studying at Harvard University, Behrendt travelled to her grandmother’s tribal lands around Walgett and Brewarrina in Northern NSW. Her time spent there allowed her to piece together the jigsaw of her father’s past, and in so doing her link to her people. “I think it says a lot about the memories of Aboriginal people that when they look at the landscape it’s like they’re reading a history book… (returning to the community) was a very powerful moment for me because it was a reminder that it didn’t matter how poor policies were that there has been something so resilient about Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal families.” Out of it came a renewed vision for lasting social infrastructure and a community undergirded by the Human Rights required for a substantive form of reconciliation. For Behrendt, there was no longer a past denial of identity, but a newborn strength shaped in the crucible of homesickness for Australia in America.

“I felt as Aboriginal there as anywhere else… I was much less concerned with my choices and I knew that I could be a Prada-loving, very comfortable urban Aboriginal person. I don’t think I would’ve felt as confident with my aboriginality if I haven’t been somewhere where there were no trappings of it,” muses Behrendt. For Behrendt, the place our nation needs to consider is ‘home.’ It is this place where Australia will find the source of the problem of Indigenous disadvantage, and the solution in the guise of reconciliation. It is this inbetween space we must go to when our sense of self is shaken. “Identity is such a complex amalgam. It’s almost as if it were one hundred percent nature and a hundred percent nurture. There’s no dichotomy around you in a sense,” says Behrendt.

As we turn the conversation from her own identity to the deeper questions of indigenous rights and law, Behrendt sports an acute academic dexterity and radiates the sensitivity of a life lived in the tensile gap between worlds. She envisages a fresh future in the auspice of an Australian Republic where the stories of the past become an ossified part of our constitution; where story is weaved into a constitution in touch with the diversity of Indigenous Australia. “People need to see the move to Republic as not just a simple legal change that changes the head of state and a few words in the constitution… but we really need to take it as a national building exercise and as an opportunity to make a more inclusive Australia.” It’s not until the policy-making of Australian governments matures from an impoverished dialogue between white and indigenous Australia, and see indigeneity as an intimate part of our history. The personal substance of Behrendt’s testimony naturally demands the respect that surpasses the clanging cymbals of political correctness and rhetoric.

In light of the rigorous political and community-based career she has pursued, it is easy to see why Behrendt was donned the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Indigenous Person of The Year for 2009. It seems that her views have touched a deeper place in the indigenous community, which stands as a testament to her natural strength as both an indigenous women and, social justice lawyer. She maintains hope, and the tenacity to strive for a form of justice rare in our society’s constant pursuit of the quick-fix pragmatism which has failed its indigenous people and redressing the injustices of the Stolen Generations. “It has been incredibly disheartening to see that now, despite the apology and despite the endorsement of the declaration on the rights of indigenous people, policies haven’t changed at all and that this government has been as tenacious about hanging onto the policies of the last government,” asserts Behrendt.

Behrendt’s next novel Legacy is coming out this October, and takes a sympathetic view of the rights movement in Australia as our next step in developing a system that has caught up with other developed nations with inbuilt Human Rights and moved beyond the horrors of the past and the current atrocities of the Northern Territory Intervention.

“Legacy’s a very different book, it really focuses on a relationship between a father and daughter - one in the rights movement and middle class educated daughter. It tries to look at the legacy of the civil rights movement and to counter those statements that people make so flippantly that rights movements haven’t worked… I think there will be a time when Australians will be comfortable with a leader who has a fairly strong social justice stance,” says Behrendt.

Legacy is released on the 26th of October.

Crying Havoc for New Theatre

“Cry Havoc sums up an attack on bad art: Cry havoc! – shake it up a bit! Try something new! Be risky, be brave! No more safe theatre. No more museum pieces. No more two people on a couch. No more TV in the theatre. No more static space, domestic theatre. We want the big stories, the big experiences and the big visceral time in the dark,” declares the fresh-faced and audacious Kate Revz.

As a former alumnus of UTS in Media and Arts Production, Kate has gone on to a directing degree at NIDA under the tutelage of Egile Kipste. From this expert training, she has gained the skills to hatch her childhood dream of her own theatre company. Having completed her Assistant Directorship with the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of God of Carnage, Revz is in a prime position to achieve her dream. Her upbeat approach and enterprising attitude have garnered the vital support of family and the big wigs in the industry such as Cry Havoc’s patron Marcus Graham, and the sponsorship of Sydney Theatre Company.



Cry Havoc is no longer the naïve high school whim that she shared with her now creative accomplice and co-founder, Gemma Pranita but is now an ever-surprising reality replete with hard work. However, Revz is adamant that the pros far outweigh the cons. She sports the confidence to authenticate her optimism. “We learnt very quickly at drama school that it’s not just going to happen… I really believe in big vision and big concept but you can’t have that without strong performances that are informed by truth and the intricacy of the text,” muses Revz.

As she recounts the story of school-day infatuations with musical directors, and the intensity of her often premature infatuation with the works of William Shakespeare as a teenager, it is quickly evident that Revz’s relationship to theatre has grown into a fully-fledged love affair with the practical traction to awaken and rebuild a thriving theatre scene.

“I believe you’ve got to go for the gut rather than the head. I try and make theatre that I want to see. I do like thinking but I prefer to be provoked to thought… You can think and think and analyse when you go to the theatre but how wonderful is it when you ‘stop thinking,’ and you just feel it and it naturally converts itself to enlightened thought,” Revz muses.

Her vision is larger than solely dramaturgy and directing. Revz is crying out for a new generation of arts activism and a renaissance that echoes the Nimrod Theatre days born of the collaboration of Australia’s theatre legends, John Bell, Richard Wherrett and Ken Horler.

“[It’s] poetic, but we like to think we are starting a new era in theatre and the revolution comes from the idea that Australians are quite comfortable with mediocrity and often there’s a lot of good theatre around but not much great theatre around… Cry Havoc for us is going to be the next premier theatre company in Sydney and we want to do this for forty years, and we want to leave a legacy… and it’s not just so we get picked up by STC,” Revz asserts.

Her fresh tenacity and determination are a product of a particular view of theatrical practice. For Revz, it is the infusion of contemporary concerns with classical theatrical texts that provide the richest crescent for the creation of compelling and bold theatre.

“You can speak about today through the great classic texts because there was a climate in Ancient Greece, and in Renaissance London and in the turn of the century Germany of saying big things through art. I don’t think it’s gone away but there seems to be another renaissance now of us realising that these big texts hold the key to our existence. I do think we are text starved. That’s where the revolutionary idea came from and the central mission of the company,” says Revz.

The company’s first production, Julius Caesar, which debuts on the 27th of October, holds a particular sentimentality as her favourite Shakespearean play, but also as a text that makes manifest the company’s own ethos and vision.

“You’re breaking bread with the dead when you work in a revolutionary way with these kinds of texts… you’re sitting on the shoulder of greats and if you start there then the sky is the limit. I’m an atheist but if I had a religion it would William Shakespeare. I’m fanatical and I defend Shakespeare if anyone threatens his authorship, and I arch up like I’m talking about Jesus. I have this profound respect for him and all his work, and I find it quite a ritualistic and religious kind of experience to work on his plays,” muses Revz.



The production difficulties and obstacles don’t seem to deter her either. The love of resurrecting a play, and getting under the skin of an audience keep her anchored. “I think we’re actually doing Shakespeare justice by taking Julius Caesar and throwing it against the wall and seeing where it breaks and of course always with the deepest respect for the work… but reading it with a contemporary angle and trying to breathe it back to life,” says Revz.

As we turn the conversation to the future, Revz’s outlook is optimistic, as if she is on the tip of a new vanguard of Australian theatre, expecting nothing less than a mutinous effect. “It’s this ephemeral process that I hope keeps working; where it’s a deep respect for the past with a strong vision towards the future, and they collide in the Molotov cocktail that is Cry Havoc,” muses Revz. It seems in these young hands we can rest assured that the future of Australian theatre is looking up.

“Our strength is that we all have the same vision, and it is one really strong factor that none of us are in this as a star vehicle, or as a step on the way to larger things,” says Revz.

Julius Caesar debuts on the 27th of October at the Wharf Theatre. See www.cryhavoc.com.au for more details.

Creation's Sunset

Civilisation is as wild as the wilderness,
And nature is as ordered; as civil as civilisation.
They are all one and made one,
In sight of the hallowed Word;
that is the creating; the created, creation.

Hush, and listen to the breath of those trees:
One alive in the light of the Sun,
Hidden by the veil of sight,
Alive by the Spirit hovering over the muddy waters;
The other bears the fruit, decaying, open like a wound -
The one, the torn apart by my bloody mouth,
from my ageing hands;
I chose and choose to pick.

The horizon exhales its fumes, coughing and diseased.
I bend myself down, lower my head –
Until I hear His wind brushing over flesh,
His Grace in cruciform branches,
Crunching, howling, cracking as they cry,
Singing and cooing with the magpie’s sigh.

So we share for a moment, reconciled;
Watching the sun’s eternity slowly decay,
As His Sacred is split,
Oil and water,
Building and bush,
Sharing the sorrow,
As I and the city skylight forget.

The Iceberg

"The only truth I know is logically defined a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." (Ursula LeGuin)

Stormwater waste drifts out to sea, churning with the waves, pummelling whitewash. The mess is sucked out and pulled, called by the iceberg that groans under the sea. The swell chews, and crunches on the cellulose. The river bank bleeds silt and decays, but as Sidney edges away, far in sight, it appears calm on the surface.

Sidney sipped instant coffee. The brown liquid slid down and broke its surface as he slurped it up over the edge of a paper cup. The bottom was left with a sludge brown residue, still runny. For a moment the liquid was still in motion. It reminded him of an ochre paint he had used the night before. With this likening, it became strangely unpalatable but he gulped the rest down. The hospital walls stretched out in white corridors. He’d been attending this bed for weeks now, his mother’s chest inflating with the soft elevations of a coma. He’d hold her hand, but it was always cold. He wanted to paint her like this, immortalise it as a kind of conscientious objection to existence, but he just held her hand as it would start to warm. He detested the stink of the place; his jacket had started to smell like the cardboard scent of an aeroplane.

The light was always blue at this time in the morning and the residing rains outside made the gloom deeper; the blue greyer. He ran his hand over a vein on her hand; blood trickling slowly down; lights shining from fluorescence above. His gaze was held on her face, following the lines of her wrinkles. He liked how they gathered into the density of a dimple on one cheek. It reminded him of how she’d smile the most she ever did on their trips in her Kombi down to her favourite spot on the South Coast. They both would sit and watch the sun setting over a Western grouping of mountains. The water was always the warmest of spots in summer, shimmering like the smoky-orange of the campfire. They danced around it and he felt his soul leaping in and around the flames.

He couldn’t bring himself to paint her, or anything about her. She was his blind spot. The silence of the room hummed out in its paradox of sounds. He craved to understand her, not so much to know her. He closed his eyes and watched as an invisible progression of souls, hidden and black, held her body up from below, pushing it up towards the light. The darkness swam around her, the voices groaning from the underneath. He felt as if generations should have been sitting there in mourning. No one had been in to see her. His aunt Judie was probably coasting down the highways, phoneless and free. She’d taken a political theory class at university, and joined an anarchist commune. All that was left of his family were libertines of the most clichéd proportions, engendering all the purest of intentions, but suffering all the mistakes of putting freedom above everything else. For this he enjoyed the silence.

He itched, and this made his diaphragm and throat shake a little from under him. “What freedom?” he thought. Most of his childhood was estranged from her, as if he were a barrier to all she thirsted after, the escapism she craved. There would be no testifying to pretence. He was sorry for the first time since his sixteenth birthday; the day he left home and found her passed out and dolled up, hair like a scarecrow. Peaceful. She had that same goddamned twilight of peace across her face. He wanted her eyelids to open, to see blue eyes. He dug his face into the grey-blonde grease of her hair, and inhaled. He choked, and loved choking, needed it, and his muscles relaxed. The nurse came in and regarded his sobbing with indifference, replacing the drip. With the interruption, and the coming dawn he decided to leave for home, weary from a broken night’s sleep.

The sun opened the sky and made the autumn air crisp. As it swept through Sidney’s hair it bobbed sleekly, forming a precarious quiff. A scent of exhaust fumes and the faint line of ocean salt on the air hit his nose. His hands felt heavy, and he wanted to get them dirty with charcoal, get furious on a canvas. The bus pulled up, and his curiosity was spiked as an old lady, a regular on this route, alighted. She was his favourite passenger, always sporting a new broach on her coat each day. She appeared to have a collection, and he marvelled at how the broaches were so uniquely different from each other, so oddly incongruous with her clothing, or the city surrounds. This time it was an iceberg, standing tall, a white cap on it like a mountain, contrast by a dark grey base, floating on the running lines of a pictorial ocean. He didn’t assign any meaning to it this time; instead he stared out over the humming of the day, undone by the sun-yellow warmth contained in his hands.

The bus doors swung open, and he greeted the clean air of the Bondi cliff faces. He caught sight of an ice-cream that had been spilt on the walkway up towards his apartment building. He caught it in passing, oozing over the wooden board; a white mound retaining some of its shape amongst the seagull-white. The sound of wash pummelled the cliffs, gushing up from below. As he walked up the steps toward the apartment block and opened the foyer door, he failed to pull all he’d seen together. He put thoughts aside, and pressed four on the elevator. He loved the mild coconut smell of the place, and the sand embedded in the carpet, and the wooden finish of the corridors. He was excited to see Michael, maybe kiss his neck and taste the salt on it from the early morning surf. A fresh canvas awaited him too, untouched, and bare.

The apartment was empty and the French doors were left slightly ajar, letting the easterly winds breeze in. A guitar was sitting on the couch amongst a pile of sheet music, and a laptop was placed next to a script marked with corrections. The shower clouds on the horizon were strung together, moving in formation closer to the shore. The glass battered lightly as the wind whimpered. Sidney decided to open up the studio room. He’d let it get musty, and it was full of mess, coffee cups and old paint that had dried hard on palettes. On the table were some of his childhood drawings that he’d gotten out the day he received the call from the hospital. They sat like a calendar, chronicles of his past, brown and tea-stained.

One pile contained pictures of his mother that he drew as a child in the sixties dresses she used to wear. In therapy he was told that he was an extreme introvert as a child, and the education system didn’t cater for his learning style. One of the drawings was missing, which he gave as a gift to his mother for her thirty seventh birthday. As a boy he thought it was his best drawing -- smoke enveloping her, cigarette ashtray full of burnt hashish by her side, sprawled out on a bed. Her reaction was engraved in his mind as he gave it to her; her lips tightened and a tear dropped from an eye. This was hidden quickly by a face, sweaty and flushed from the summer heat. She starred at it for a moment, in awe of what he could do, but this was concealed by a blush, an untamed fury rising, a crack, a bloodshot vein. “Are you testing me?” she said. Her face would bend in anger, beautiful and savage like that.

There was a severe drought and bushfires that year, and the city was flurried by a cloud of black ash and dust. Ribbons and strips of ash would fall like a black rain. As the wind carried them, her breath came like eucalypt vapour, dry and wavering in the heat, sucked up by flame. As she slapped him he would just focus on the one tooth, black behind the white, half-dead and hanging from ruddy gums. His nose would dribble, and dry, caked with the ash. He was grounded for three months, and given a severe strapping. Blue bruises stung if he sat, and they stretched over most of his buttocks. She took his drawing outside with her, setting it alight with her cigarette lighter and proceeded to bring in the washing. He saw the flames through his back window; smoke rising from the kindling of a barbeque. From that day the fire stung him, cooked his flesh. He wanted to let it up; extinguish the embers. His hands moved over the canvas, unsure of what he’d draw, with that same image of her in peace on the bed, floating with the smoke.

He wanted to sleep, to have Michael by his side as the hours passed. His toes dug into the carpet. The charcoal box contained only a few remaining cylinders, his canvas a bending ocean moving yet still with the crushing of waves. From obtuse arches and curves came a shape like an iceberg. It sat amongst the two dimensional mess, sticking up and over, above the chaos; a dark monolith against a grey sky, a black expanse beneath. He’d never charcoaled like this before – it had always been abstracts made with ochres, fluid and languid; surrealist landscapes that made the industrial natural and the natural industrial and merged the bush and the sea with the geometries of city centres, factories, and warehouses. His supervisor at art school always tried to introduce him to oils and paints because he had the nimble fingers, and the eye for visual textures. She said they’d provide him with greater modality, contrast, depth of exposition. A charcoalist had to have large palms, and rough thumbs, always handicapped in the art market by the shortened longevity of their medium.

His buyers loved them, but he wasn’t sure he did. As he continued sketching, he felt the hint of flamboyancy in his hands that he hadn’t for a long time. It was a release of colours – yellows and light blues, and reds. Vibrancy came all in a rush, like a smudged rainbow falling with the rain. The wind swept up, whistling outside with the onset of a shower. He closed a window, sitting and adjusting the drawing. He hadn’t heard the figure creeping behind him with the pummelling of the rain. He flinched slightly as Michael kissed him on the neck, running his hands over his shoulders in a massage. A wave of exhaustion overcame him as Michael plied and caressed his shoulders. Michael’s eyes smiled, speculating the shape in front of him.

The surf was really choppy today, full of twigs and rubbish… unusually cold too – they say there’re icebergs floating up from the arctic.
Sidney rubbed his black hands together.
I had a productive day.
Y’know, this is really different, Sid.
I’m happy with it.
Thought we could go for a walk after the rain stops.
Bit tired. Can we make it an early night? Got to see Mum again early tomorrow.

The sun was revealed by the passing of the shower clouds. It slid under the horizon, a yellow orb encased with orange ochres. Sidney tasted the light and it was dry like the tip of Michael’s lips. He kissed them and ran his hands over his back, smearing Michael’s singlet, dunness like shale, sweaty from a jog. The black of the sea devoured the day, and they swam in its orange sleekness, under the shimmering as the eucalypt smoke burnt off. Heat rose to a sating breath; a gasp up on the surface. The cliff faces called with the final tweets and shrills of birds amongst the green of the bottlebrush. The waves crashed on the iceberg, gurgling with the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity being drawn out into utterance. It sank deeper, thawing out with time.

Sidney woke to the dark, Michael lying sprawled on the bed, mouth hanging open as he twitched in dream. That same blue light confronted him, and filled the whole room; his mother’s chest emptying: the long, slow exhale of the ocean noise outside. He opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk unable to sleep. The digital clock on the microwave flashed 5:13am. He drank the milk up and over the room’s stillness. He put on his jacket and went down in the elevator. He was dazed, staring at his reflection in the silver of its steal plating; a groggy blur. He liked the new flowers in the foyer. They were wax-red lilies, and blooming full, their stamens furry with yellow pollen. His new landlord had a better maintenance keeper than the last. He closed the foyer door. The sky was dark, except for house lights on the head land and street lights in the distance. He noticed the ice-cream from yesterday had run off with the rain and water was still running off under the wooden boards and mossy undergrowth. The sandstone cliffs stood high, reaching over the sea like the heads of ancient creatures and the waves were crashing hard from the swell of the low pressure system funnelling out to sea. His favourite rock pool for swimming was overflowing with the high tide.

He climbed up and over the bush track along the side of the cliffs. He expected to see runners weaving their way along the track, the corporates enjoying the same early morning freedom. Perhaps it was too early. Instead the track was empty, and he walked over the wooden floor boards to look out a little higher up. As he listened to the snores of early morning; a rat scurrying past him, and the occasional rustle in the bushes, he sat on a railing at the southern most point, and stared out over the declension of the cliff faces. He had often gained inspiration from the rock faces; carved out by the rain and salt. He greeted the first of the buttery light of dawn on the horizon and the sand white beach in the curve of the bay. His eye moved curiously to a figure far across from him who stuck out from the landscape. They were lower on one the sandstone ledges to the most seaward extremity across the escarpment, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He couldn’t make them out exactly but he watched as their hair blew in the wind. It wailed a little in his ears.

The figure stood there motionless, staring out to sea, like a living memorial to the drowning sound − some grand figure from myth, emerging out from the blue of the sky. The figure seemed unfettered by time and consummate to the force pushing them back from the cliff face. Sidney’s heart started to beat faster as he felt the unease of their closeness to the edge, and heard the silence of their fall. The white wash rushed around it as the figure hit the surface, breaking it open; sinking under the sea.

God

When hills become mountains,

Clouds fall as pellets,

Ice screeches down,

Sheets run,

In cold forms around

Me and the shadow.



Grasses and waters waver,

Yet I'm only sky,

Dotted with sequin light,

Silent explosions,

Glistening off,

So near, so far