Flower

(Montignac)

She sees the flowers are red flags
like pennants hauled up, heralding danger,
hailing the world and its lovers
with admonitions:
watch out, watch out.

On long stalks they wobble
and wave, handkerchiefs flaring
long after the ship has left port,
their scarlet hue a constancy,
an accusation,
each flower, proud,

a finger pointing,
away, away
and beckoning,
come back, come back.

At their base, sun pours
through leaves, shafts of light
like stained glass,
veins etched lead solder.

One stem rises in a separate salute,
its arc empty of flowers,
green hasps like tiny medieval chalices.
They cast shadows on the table,
love hearts, all of them.

Adrienne Eberhard

Bill And Gwen

In Swiftian mood, insisting that
The human race would never learn,
Was hopeless, doomed, Bill Harwood, pure
Logician and philosopher,
As well as spouse of poet Gwen,

Proposed a universal ban
On sex to end our sorry ways
And brought our threesome's talk on how
The world was going to a halt
Of the socially awkward kind.

Then magically, as tension grew,
As though specifically she knew
This impasse would arise, she whipped
A book up from her lap and showed,
Spread open at the very page,

A photo of a rationalist
And his divinely inspired wife,
Of Abelard and Heloise,
Their mediaeval counterparts
As sculpted on a column in

The Conciergerie, Paris,
His castrated parts cupped by her
Protectively as in a nest,
Their stooped backs turned forever on
Each other in a bed of stone.

Graeme Hetherington

Voyaging

I          Marie Antoinette, imprisoned in Paris in 1791,
           to Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin,
           departing from Brest on d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition

Your breasts, small as flowers, lie flat,
unlike the ocean’s endless swells.
Tell me of the constant rising, the blue days
that stretch to months.    Minutes spool
to hours here, and I’m a fool,
my mind unruly as a child’s.

Your breasts oppressed with weight
of jacket, shirt, wool and linen,
lie hidden from the prying eyes of men.
I imagine you, collar tight, buttoned in bone,
your shirt white as skin. At night, alone,
do you bare your chest to the cool air?

My breasts, pale and shrunken,
are hampered too. I wrap them
in a winding sheet, build
a man’s facade to face the fray.
Abundant, blossoming, once they
inspired vessels in which milk nestled:

my breasts, moulded in pale porcelain,
the cup an aching memory.
Wanton moths bang their bodies
on glass panes. I loved those cups,
fragile as moonlight,
the stain the milk left, like a ruff of silk.

Your breasts, your woman’s body
tied and taped into trousers and shirt.
Your hurt etched in your face.
The ocean reaching its blue arms,
wrapping them around you,
holding tight, through the long, long nights.

My breasts, my woman’s body,
tired and trapped in a world gone wild.
Are you beguiled, like me, by moths, their wings
a prayer to lift you, their bodies burning with light?
I watch them and remember summer nights when I
spilled from dresses, creamy and abundant as milk.

II          Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin to Marie Antoinette

the sea a blue furling tightly bound the sheets the cords strapped and straining the ache the creak the holdfast as we left the shore behind chaos and an infinite sky the wind a benefactor its breath our battlefield the spilling of fear we were awash with rain and sea it drummed on our skin setting it alight with liquid the sky streaming screaming haunted by bird call by the wind lifting its throat widening its jaws its shifting embrace a body blow that blasted the world asunder the past a mockery a flawed thing with burnt claws the present an unknown our performers’ wigs askew voices deep as earth’s bowels the rain a cloak a hiding place his tears my tears washing changing charging all air alive and skin streaming the ship a chess piece moving step by step towards release unease lifting the world firmer despite its watery foundations my shirt sleeves soft against this toughening skin this body a chrysalis from which I inch slow sure steady the astonishing blue a gleam in an eye the sea aglow the sea a blue unfurling

Adrienne Eberhard

Learning To Know One's Place

(For Gwen Harwood And James McAuley)

'Hello Graeme, old love, it's Gwen,
I'm sitting on a cloud too fine
For jealousy to let you see.
But please believe your ears as I

Exhort you not to bow to age,
To keep tramping around in search
Of at least one poem that will be
As sure of fame as all mine are.

There's still life in your Hell's Gate's, West
Coast of Tasmania being that's
Done well despite the limits of
Its origins encumbering you,

The baggage you can't shed to fly
As high as I have done, or Jim,
Who sits upon the right hand side
Of you-know-who and sends his love'.

Graeme Hetherington