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Draped across a sheepskin
Bea lies in front of her crackling heat and reveals
Only the tiniest fragment of her stolen youth and enquires
In response to the question asked:
“So do you hate them for it?”
“Only for the touches on my skin
That lingered with pleasure, and a kindness that steals
Your chance for despising all the rest” He says and expires
Back into the leather sofa tasked with
Trying to let them off for it.
“but for what?” she asks again
Searching out the point. “I saw my grandmothers heels shot
From horseback like that wounded knee….so?” He tires
Knowing he has exposed at last
His own prerequisite.
Anyhow the crumpled photo slips within
Repossessed letters, then not received, now readied for the fire. It
feels
Like some escape with scrawling on the boarding house spires
And across the smiling face in ghastly
White: ‘I forgive you’ unmerited and unfit.
-
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14 comments:
this is great doc, touching and demanding investigation
isolated from context your words carry a sad echo and a tired willingness to confront the uncomfortable
I wonder if you would care to discuss how this came about?
ps/ I love the way that the word /feels/ is excluded from the flow, hesitant, unsure, a new sensation?
file
In the 1980s I was at a gathering where indigenous students were discussing how they were going to individually and jointly cope with the information which was coming to their hands from our Aboriginal studies course....
especially hearing of so many others of the stolen generation with similar stories to their own - stolen from families, language and culture beaten out, rape, separate fostering, denaial of family visits, letters withheld and censored, misinformation and a host of brutal and intolerable disgraces to which they were, in many cases (though not all) subjected.
it was a depressing, harrowing, and at times uplifting journey from which I can never escape having been witness, even though I am not an indigenous Australian.
Doc,
I lived for years in the south-west of Ireland, within walking distance of the ruins of Kilcrea Friary, which harbours a tomb bearing the following inscription:
"Lo Arthur Leary
Generous Handsome Brave
slain in His Bloom
Lies in this Humble Grave
Died May 4th 1773 Aged 26 years"
Shot because he refused to sell his proud steed to an English officer who was offering a fiver for it. His wife, Eileen O' Connell, wrote a 390-line lament of heartbreaking beauty, to which I am unfortunately unable to find a link right now.
I used to walk to Kilcrea a lot and think of the unbearable forgiveness, in any time or place stained by such acts, to which we must aspire.
Your piece put me in mind of that, and many other instances, closer to where I daydream at present.
doc, offside,
whiter than white huh? at least you are facing the truths
I was born in Canada and the history of the indigens and the whites is no better there
Chief Dan George
My people's memory
reaches into the
beginning of all things
yet: Rita Joe
I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Schubenacadie school.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
the scrambled ballad, about my word.
Two ways I talk
Both ways I say,
Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask,
Let me find my talk
both first nations poets, both 'civilized' like the Aborigine and the Irish, all enforced English speakers
offside, irrepressable 'living' history, many thanks
I don't know what races you are, but I'm white, and I often wonder how we live with ourselves?
sometimes I think that I would prefer to have been with the losers, living and dieing in ugly pain, than the winners, forgetting and getting fat, I just don't want to be associated with that, but I can't help it
file and offside you have done it...
i had these floodgates sealed up and now you have opened a crack and I fear the worst....
it's back again that bird of shakespeare joyce and kerouac, of woolfe and
"My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought you your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay."
--Dark Eileen O'Connell 1773
....and now the horse is cracking wild across the paddock in the moonlight waiting...
dare one grip the bridle and stride into the night or just
stay here beside the fire....
again again the crackling call of a wild throat an I am gone...
Hooray! This is just what I wanted this site to do/be/start -whatever.
Thanks Doc. Beautiful poem.
file,
I dont know about you but I'm working on my suntan and on keeping waistline expansion to acceptable levels through the use of a Tahitian paddle, mantra-ing with every stroke a litany of sorts: thou shall not / stroke/ detonate nuclear bombs / stroke / over other peoples' islands / stroke / thou shall not / stroke / etc / stroke / ad infinitum / stroke / til you return to shore / ahhhhhhhh.
Seriously now, I refuse to carry guilt for any action that I haven't been personally responsible for, and there are enough of those as it is. Wherever we come from, if we had to live with the guilt baggage of our countrymen's past and present misdeeds, we would be paralyzed by it. Consciousness, yes, memory, yes, and mending what can be mended through day-to-day, unpretentious, decent behaviour. That's all I can think of, but maybe that's a start.
Doc,
if you get a chance, go to Kilcrea in May, the beauty of the whitethorn bushes in bloom will break your heart and heal your wounds. Then push on, on the Cork to Killarney road, to Gobnait's holy well up in the hills, where the pagan and the christian merge. Ease back down the road then, to the town of Macroom and Mary Ann's pub, and drink a pint of Murphy's to my health. No matter what time zone I'm in, this is where my heart resides, most of the time. My daughter was born there (not in the pub, file, in nearby Cork) and I've had too much birthday cake, it's making me sentimental. She's six today, the Irish rose of Moorea.
Zeph,
is that really what you had in mind, a global audience of three, spanning twenty-four time zones and gibbering on into the ether until the sun never sets? A resounding success so far!
Offside, here's a link to the Eilen O'Connell lament:
http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/Poetry/NiChonaill.html
It is very beautiful, and interesting how it brings in the other voice of his sister.
Offside, was it Montaigne who when asked if he wanted lots of readers said "je m'en contenterais d'un; je m'en contenterais de pas un"? Three is two more than I expected.
You realise that little Offspring is doomed to wander the earth when she grows up, searching always for somewhere as beautiful as the places where she was born and raised? What a terrible thing you've done to that child.
offside and zeph
it is said in the australian outback that if you keep your campfire going at first the moths will come and talk....
and other wanderers attracted by the light may join....if not you still have a fire
no guilt,
human race only,
and questions of culture are all that bind and separate, the rest is invention and fancy....
"God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice."
John Donne (he was my first real exposure to existentialism, and pangenesis and renewal, so I cannot help but slip him in wherever....)
I hardly have time for such sweet sorrows as these, such is the whirligig of London life, but I ought, as it's plaintive and necessary.
Like Offside, I learn the history (and try to teach it in tiny ways) but I refuse the guilt, as I have enough that is personal and, if I'm honest, I find it patronising.
Do honour to the past by one's actions in the present is the best I can come up with and, as I have mentioned before, Phil Dick's utterly unpoetic, but immensely useful, "We are what we do" are five words that present sufficient challenge to me.
I was at Tralee races in 1991 - different world.
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