After Storm Katie: a poem

  for Tracy, after twenty years of Cambridge

Getting out. Good for physical and mental health.

And the coal tit ratcheting up so local and yet we know

that refrain from Swabia. Shouldn’t be surprised by this.

Humans validate their omnivorous desire for presence

in the global and the local, the near and far. Polyamorous 

for place. So I am walking the route as if it’s my route 

mapped onto my psyche — out towards Madingley. But 

the gigantic West Cambridge University Estate is becoming

and Seven Pillars arch over the incomplete buildings:

seven yellow cranes facing away from south-westerlies

dying off with sunset. The entire south has been ‘battered’

into a weird submissiveness, and semantics and intonation

and subtext and double-meanings ramp up the translation.

The ground is being trained, the domestic brutalised by

the forces of God which have bizarrely become our forces.

We control the weather by inverted default. We are pantheistic

and pandemic and universal. All at once. I think this, marvelling

the Seven Pillars have stayed upright, their long arms reaching

towards tomorrow’s sunrise as the planet skews a little more,

and those concrete counterweights heavy as security. Into the sun,

then buffering it through the back of my head, the roads hiss

as all come out to play and unbroken daffodils look to their roots.

  John Kinsella

Now that April's (almost) there...

By Tracy

This northern spring marks twenty years since John & I first came to Cambridge together  (we'd been two years married at that point).

Photo by Tim Kinsella

In the grounds of Churchill College

Today, back here after Germany, we met the same beautiful spring weather as twenty years ago (though it's due to turn not-so-lovely from tomorrow).

Churchill daffodils, 2016

Daffodils are out everywhere, and in town the Easter crowds have been enjoying the sunshine.

Here's a section from a poem John wrote in Cambridge back in the early days here, in 1996, and published in Fenland Pastorals (Prest Root Press, 1998)... The poem is called "Triptych: Poems from Churchill College, Cambridge".

3. Seed Cases 

                        for Tracy

Dark clouds thicken overhead

but there's not enough moisture

in the air to prevent the cracking

of seed cases: that crackling

like fire in undergrowth,

or water exploding on hot metal.

A partial collusion of the elements—

only the fifth element missing,

as if the eponymous has no part

in the moment. You hear the seed cases

opening and searching your memory

for a name, a species, find nothing.

But it's a familiar sound—it brings back

Dryandra Forest in the South-West

of Australia. Even the hemisphere

is different. The brain struggles

with location. It's the moment

of aloneness that's captured you,

when nameless plants execute

their cycles. People are absent.

A robin glows nearby. You know

its name and it knows yours. It is wary

and you remain still. The seed falls
and covers friable earth like snow.

And here's one from my early Cambridge days, again an extract from a longer sequence called "Noli Me Tangere", written at Easter in 1996 and published in The Willing Eye (Fremantle Press & Bloodaxe, 1999 & 2000). (Back then I was still working my way out of the Christian faith in which I had grown up; I now have no belief in formal religion. Doubt was showing in the fuller version of this poem...) Note that the fickle Cambridge weather is in there already! The seasons no longer offering stable metaphors were a reference to the fact that climate change was already very noticeable, back when we had no Google yet and email was brand new to us.


5
Faith blows hot & cold
as Cambridge in spring
where late snow dissipates
before reaching any surface
where nothing penetrates

where those who drank in
yesterday's sun
are caught out now, ill-dressed
for this fickleness,

for this world whose seasons
no longer offer
stable metaphors for
spiritual states.

But then you were never
afraid of change
God of transitions
God of this Easter

constant & steadfast only
in your refusal
to be pinned there.


One of the things John likes about Churchill College is that its chapel is ecumenical (in fact his play "Ecumenical" was performed in that chapel in 2012, directed by Tim Cribb).

And here's a pic of the two of us in the early Cambridge days, in the same flats where we are now and have spent much time over those 20 years. (John used to get a lot more sun in those days, before skin cancers took their toll!)

Photo by Bettina Keil

Close encounter

By Tracy

No photo this time, because I was taken unawares:

I just now walked out to put some material in the recycling bin, and two feet in front of me, on our verandah, was a huge gwardar (western brown snake).

My heart is still thumping. It was beautiful, but the size of it was overwhelming, and the fact that it was just outside the front door. If you've never met one, you can read about this lovely but dangerous creature here.

It swished along the line where the wall meets the floor and disappeared behind the recycling bin.

(W. said when she opened the front door this morning, a big bungarra was sitting there! Two close encounters in one morning. The bungarra, however, is not venomous.)

It reminds me how visibly cyclical our life is here -- last November we had similar encounters.

Wildflower time in the wheatbelt

By Tracy

Orchids (and one isolated everlasting -- soon they will be out in their thousands)...