4. Kathryn Fry's 'Impromptu' -- for Jill McKeowen

 

Impromptu

for Jill McKeowen

 

                                                                our place in the connectedness of things

                                                                       Gail Hennessy, ‘Our Eclectic Garden’

 

His hands skip over the piano keys

trilling them as if there’s no weight

in the years we’ve been together,

 

the rhythms of family and garden

by a backdrop of native bush. He sets

the harmony with strong chords, melodic

 

as the orchids and roses in their seasons.

He improvises variations: lunch

by the lillypilly, lorikeets in the grevilleas

 

and birdbath, a grandchild running across

the lawn by bromeliads and ferns,

that haven of shelter for magpies in the heat.

 

O, there’s a familiar cadence, welcome

as a homecoming. How lucky to have

such company, lemon and lavender, ficifolia

 

and cycad, memories from our mothers’

gardens in the breynia and feijoa;

their shape and size and colour are songs

 

to save us. At the end of his impromptu

it’s as if the room overflows

with the slow, luscious notes of gardenias.

 

Kathryn Fry

3. Gail Hennessy's 'Our Eclectic garden' -- for Kathryn Fry

 

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

2. Jean Kent's 'In my Mother's Garden' -- for Gail Hennessy

 

2

In my Mother’s Garden

   for Gail Hennessy

first thing from the veranda

an orchestra tuning
instruments of bright …

Kit Kelen, ‘secret no one can keep’

For an hour before dawn a secret bird
practises its song.  Nine notes,
a melody neat

as an artlessly tied silk scarf,
too quicky looped &
flung around the neck of the garden

for its labour to linger in my ear.

In this drowsing twilight my dream –
harrowing empty corridors,
seeding departed rooms
with small hopes of finding my mother—

ends with a bunch of hospital flowers,
a bought garden bright in my hands
but no dented metal dipper like hers

offering a rainwater bath before a vase.

Spangled with spiderwebs her garden
makes mazes now—
narrow pathways with more room
for plants than people.

Under the curtaining wisteria
who will take banana peel
to the orchids?  Who will shiver the dew
over the freesias and the thryptomene?

Who will follow her,
snipping and sniffing and accepting
the riddles of sleeping under earth

and waking seasons later

as if the secret we forget could never be
that we’re just flutter-byes,
brief flittery visitors

to these springs, premature
or predictably passing
in a wink?

Remembering our hydrangeas of childhood,
how patiently they waited for summer
to fill heads with sky-blue

I think of the man in Japan
drowned in tears after the 2011 tsunami,
searching for his family in the Fukushima ruins

until, at last, he planted canola,
a maze of rising sunshine,
a place to be happily lost.

Though it will not last forever,
the light is longer there.
It opens the faces of visitors like secrets

everyone is happy to share.
For this season of flowering, at least,
we all know

if we save the garden, the garden may save us.

 

JEAN KENT

1. Kit Kelen's 'secret no one can keep' -- for Jean Kent

 

1

Kit Kelen

secret no one can keep

 

for Jean Kent

 

 

and now everyone knows

 

it’s the longer light

the mud to life

(a theory once)

 

how dare

and flirt

 

first thing from the veranda

an orchestra tuning

instruments of bright

 

nor anything regular intended

feathers carry word (which isn’t)

 

insects cone up, gyre like motes

 

can’t help the odd paint splash now

flowers all put on a show

 

a riddle in the turning

how we could come to here

 

woody thickets of delve

where nectar

 

parrots in mandarin

brazen sneak

 

glimpse them wing it too

a rite?

 

commence thirst

 

near the zenith

throw cloud by shade

we seek  

and shield the eyes from glare

 

later in the day

burn off last winter piles

 

a season as ever

never before!

 

limber and spit

get your hands on it

 

try a little nakedness now

dance breeze

 

dusk dew welcome

 

it is a week premature perhaps

sprightly and soon sprawl

 

the secret is out

now it’s Spring! 

RESTARTING COMMON OR GARDEN POETS

Common or Garden Poets is an open-ended and ongoing Flying Islands Poetry Community initiative. It’s a conversation in poetry of any kind; and likewise in art, in photography -- in every case, in some way, concerning the garden, or perhaps the not-a-garden, perhaps the wilderness or urban space in which a garden needs to be imagined.

Common or Garden Poets began in 2022 but stalled because of a few technical glitches.

In restarting Common or Garden Poets, we pay tribute to two of the original contributors who have recently died -- Gail Hennessy and Jill McKeowen.

And, because gardens are somewhere, and because people belong to places, we acknowledge and pay our respects to the first peoples, wherever we are, of whatever country we're on. 

Welcome readers and welcome Common or Garden Poets!

To become a member contributor to Common or Garden Poets is pretty straightforward. A member invites you to contribute by writing you a poem. Once you have posted your poem to the blog, you are a member contributor. As a contributor, you don't have to post only new poems, but they do have to be new to the blog, and they have to be your original work. (We're not collecting garden poems from hither and yon, we're making them here.) Whenever you post you have an opportunity to invite a new friend into the garden. Alternatively you could respond to someone who's already in the garden. The idea is that the poems in the blog are in conversation with each other.

You could think of Common or Garden Poets as an 'expanding circle' of poets who share a common interest. We want our garden to be democratic, open and inviting. 

Once you have joined the common or garden poets you will be given the keys (allowing you to post directly) and you may contribute as often or as rarely as you like. You should always feel free to invite other poets or artists into the blog so that our garden grows with new voices. Each member contributor of Common or Garden Poets  thus has a kind of gatekeeping responsibility. So, please, we are only inviting into the garden those whom we can take seriously as poets and/or artists.  The poetasters are legion and united in their conviction that they are able to do what they are not able to do: to whit, to write a poem. 

Please follow the numbering system set up from the first post. That is -- when you post number your poem in the title line to show it is next in the series. This makes searching for work easier later on. You might like to include the date in the post itself as well. Feel free to combine text and image in whatever way suits. 

If you have any questions or doubts please just ask. And feel free to make suggestions!

 

kk

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