Second poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

Outside the glasshouse

I lose you for a moment and then catch sight:

crouched under twin camellias you approach

with the lens as one might

a timid animal,

allowing them soul.

I hold back: double pink, double red,

such richness best at a distance

or I am swamped

unless it’s instinct

tells me not to intrude

between you and the beauty

of your own response.

Starvation for months

and now this glut of colour

almost insulting in its abundance.

Not all at once

but bud by snub bud they unloose

their vivacity, raised cups

we’d slake our hurts at

if we could only trust

they’d last – longevity

and faithfulness, the books says

so you store an image

to paint them from

like tracing and retracing

a lover’s name.

                     — Tracy Ryan

All these photos were taken by Mhairi in the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, which gave me the central idea for the book Hothouse, from which the poems are themselves taken.

First poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

These poems were not written "in memoriam" but during the course of the friendship, and were published in Hothouse (2002/2006). I never thought to be posting them so long after, and in such circumstances. I just learnt that Mhairi passed away in the UK last month. She was a gifted poet as well as pianist, a film buff, and a savvy winner at all board games.

She was also a fluent speaker and avid reader of French, and a half-dozen of the best French novels I have on my shelf here at Jam Tree Gully were gifts from her, because she loved to give presents.

The first poem takes a line from a beautiful DH Lawrence poem, which ends "in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past".

Piano

Small walls and the furniture

too large, as in a dolls’ house,

or a Dutch interior

the swollen disproportions

of a dream;

a baby grand and you playing

Bach and Satie

as my grandmother played the Polonaises

and my mother the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata

suddenly the hunger

to pick it up again, dropped stitch,

to let fingers go as they know because

it was trained into me

every morning

or because I was born to it

and let it go, wasted and taken for granted

like water; this our idiom

I’ve abstained from

out of some foolish notion

of imperfection, forgetting the pure pleasure

the insidious mastery of song

that makes the child’s heart beat faster

as I stand there

wordless but listening

with my arms around her

in the chill spring.

                                                   —Tracy Ryan

The Failure of Pastoral and Australian Mining Companies' Ongoing Rapacity

Eclogue of the Pastoral Where There Should be No Pastoral (Per Se)

‘Pastoral muse, offer help!’

            Miklós Radnóti, ‘Third Eclogue’ (trans. Emery George)

As the paternalistic miner tries to nip

‘native title’ in the bud — to reset to non-

exclusive, to make the buds recent if the iron

is ancient; while Rio Tinto blast and destroy

Juukan Gorge shelters as sacred a place on earth

as time has allowed as has been invested

with spirit — and the company has done so

with the Crown’s law on their side...  it’s

impossible to justify pastorals

in any form, even as countermands

to the ideas they carry to infiltrate

and contaminate. It’s impossible

to configure in any way that best

serves its plea, and makes context

of reading, of land scaped into contra-

productivity, cultivated against its spirit.

All such comparisons fail, some are odious,

but death is death and tyranny tyranny

and we who reach for the literary

language of far-away localities

bound into sheaves for emperors

and land owners, for ‘readers of taste’,

for things growing in the best possible

order even when crops fail and fauns

and satyrs OD on toxins and drop dead,

this is why in the end ‘pastoral’

can only be an idea of the market —

isn’t that so, isn’t that the scenario:

the spending splurge, the largesse,

ahead of a bountiful harvest, profits,

            giving with one hand?

            John Kinsella