Poems

suburban garden song

for Irina Frolova

…songs that save us…

…the slow luscious note of gardenias

Kathryn Fry, ‘Impromptu’

the koel song has arrived, rolling

from the leafy night

as wattle bird cracks the dawn

step out

to the warming world, crimson

lanterns of bottlebrush lit

in a thousand filaments

overnight the young orb

has hung its web, renewal glistening

from awning to gardenia     

on the cusp

of summer, soft as crepe, expiring

waves of perfume

to November’s purple sky

they’ll melt in time to creamy yellow

burn to bronze and fall

like cotton sheets on summer skin

the garden is for being

as we are, a daily practice

not quite finished, and when I’m gone

no-one will know the details

how I sit in the dirt pulling weeds

or digging my fingers in

with the planting of good ideas

                                        the garden guides us

through our small mortality

adapting and enduring, says

this is how it feels to be alive

like every plant, the human body’s

impulse is to heal while moving

yet toward its end

oblivious

a blue-tongue lizard slides through

the litter of gardenia leaves

and blueberry lily knots

at dusk, vermillion cloud vibrates

in each geranium petal disappearing

to inevitable night  

the roots of life

weave with worms and detritus

and insects sing the white moon

for summer’s returning arc

Our Eclectic Garden

for Kathryn Fry

                                                                           Under the curtaining wisteria

                                                                           who will take banana peel

                                                                           to the orchids? Who will shiver the dew

                                                                          over the freesias and the thryptomene?

                                                                          Jean Kent, ‘In My Mother’s Garden’

for every house called home

there is a frame

with you the constant gardener

plants are portals into the past

like illustrations from a Book of Hours

in Spring

bulbs corms and tubers

push through the earth

purloined cuttings take on new life

my grandmother’s ivory freesias

heavy the air with the smell of childhood

my mother’s blood red dahlia petals

open as big as proverbial dinner plates

tree ferns from my brother

uncoil to feather the sky

your mother’s asparagus fern flows against

your ceramic I named ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good’

pink azaleas paint

the garden facing the street

to a postcard memory from our student days

Utrillo’s Les Maison Roses

in the beginning

friends from Canberra arrived

their car filled

with root balled camellias

to fill the courtyard in winter

with leaf gloss and flower

sometimes I change the names

Commander Mulroy becomes Sawada’s Dream

identical camellias white edging to pink

and who wouldn’t be tempted

to swap the military for romance?

when the nursery was out of stock

Soul Sister became a substitute Julia’s Rose

the name I want to remember her by

it’s a league of nations

Chinese Jasmine a pillar of grounded stars

climbs skyward around a verandah post

Callistemon rubs shoulders with Nandina Domestica

the front door key waits

for family and friends

under the stone god from Bali

its plinth a home for slaters and worms

tiger worms recycle kitchen scraps

you shovel ash from the hearth

I offer coffee grounds to the hydrangeas

our Labrador composts

under a camellia holding memories

of his faithful welcome home

a lap of honour circling the clothesline

fish laze the pond

in circles of gold

frogs surface to deafen the evenings

today we watch the bowerbird

decorating his edifice

squawk and hop

black sheen on the wing

meticulous arranger of blue

clothespegs milk container tops

over the back fence

a bushland reserve houses

bandicoots and water dragons

possums blue tongues and owls

the ironic laughter of kookaburras

our place in the connectedness of things.

Gail Hennessy