WINTER SOUNDING

The well’s been sunk through frozen earth,
Through cairn-grey rock as hard as fate.
My mother’s face stares from thin ice,

Her mother shadowed underneath,
A spirit blowing breath upon
Black water stiller than a stone.

2

My grandmother’s shadow wiped light off a wall,
Turned and spilled across the iron
Ceiling of a shed. It fell like a shroud
With archaic folds. Adam had been trapped

Playing with Eve who lived next door.
Our punishment, we were told, might be slow,
But it would be sure. Jehovah’s word was law.
Eve screamed with meningitis in the children’s ward.

Literally God fashioned her into a wheel of pain.
I remember waking from a dream: they had buried her
In my grandmother’s round, black Sunday hatbox.
I cried myself back into sleep. No one was able to explain.

3

At sixty-five my aunt is twenty years
A lunatic. Her mother’s eyes, the eyes
Of all she met that raked and broke to dirt
No longer worry her. Everything is clean.

They let her walk a sunlit beach.
Her shadow moves into eclipse at noon.
White rocks ring out like wedding bells.
She lies on them and loves the world.

Their light-honed edges bleed the sky
To pale fanatic blue that stretches thin.
The pillars of her day have fallen in.
Black will be black until she prays

For arms of sun to reach into the sea
And hand up stars to wash the sky.
For twenty years she has been what she is,
A quarter moon, a smile without a face.

4

My grandfather rose like a galleon into sight,
Taller than the hills as I watched him coming near,
Waiting to be swung and lifted from the gate,
Clear above the dirt and stiff damp of his coat,

My grandmother waiting, small and out of reach,
Close by the woodshed with clean clothes in her arms.
In dreams I’ve joined him in the shed and slept
Among the smells of carbide, mud and sweat.

5

No pictures hanging on the walls,
No shell or stone or bit of wood,
No lived-in look or softening touch,
Just tables, cupboards, chairs and beds

And thick brown doormats front and back,
The fireplace stonework painted white.
My snow-queen mother was pure ice
And swept out feelings like the dust.

6

My mother sat beneath a tree,
The sun-flushed cherry in our yard.
She rocked me gently in her lap,
All smiles and kisses till I cried,

In hungry rage tore at her blouse.
My mother gave her breast and frowned,
My father strode forth from his house
And cut the tree down with a glance.

7

They chased me for my girlish ways
But feared the slippery crossing stones
That led me to my secret place.
I hid the things I valued most

Beneath a piece of emerald moss.
Glass marbles flashed like eagles’ eyes
And chunks of quartzite glittered white
Within a treasure trove of hate.

The man ferns darkening overhead,
The tea-tree screening off the road,
It sometimes comes back black as pain,
A slit of water like a knife.

8

Like a tray of jewels the river runs in light.
My childhood face stares through the sun at me.
Time splits compellingly, asking me to join.
Riches and their warmth tempt me in this form

Because they should have been but were never there.
The child is father of the man, jewellery
Is paste. Around my neck gold ropes untwine
And melt like candy sticks. The river floats me on.

© Copyright: Graeme Hetherington