Women’s Ancestral Hand (Birthing Cloth III)
i am the pattern of life within the seed
in the palm of the hand of the Ancestor
that created my Women’s Law
the tongue that spoke it the song
that sang it the feet that danced it
i am the dust danced up from my
mother’s body in the dance i am
the ochred herstory that painted the journeys
in the deep earth of remembering
i am the mind that remembers
i have no ending time i am
continuous as the long search i am the shoot
sprung from the soil after the fire has passed
i am its spirit
that has not forgotten its roots
©Jennifer A Martiniello.
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epicentric melody
I prefer to be
dashed and Gregorian
like thunder on rocks
than
padded up in musty
crushed velvet
so as not to make
noise
I am
not made to be
noiseless
I am
the scream of bird
lifted from the lidless labyrinth
the gut-hot
grind of cogitation that boils
the mill pond to shuddering
ecstasy
the lyrical hyper-
gyration of a universe
moving to its own
music
oratorio
blues swing
percussion
the drum of the storm’s fist
on sleek smooth silenced
roofs, I am
the undead
risen
from safe tombs behind
eloquent carvings and flowers
where silence is
an anathema
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Facing Weereewa
1
on her body
fence wires lie like music
fallen from the sheet
to earth, still
rippling with the light
of their lost song
2
grasses tunnel the wind
across the lakebed’s stubbled gold
the only verticality human
punctuations that sever the horizon’s
syntax like the momentary shadows
of moving fence posts in time
3
the gap is all mirage
blue
swimmer genesis
its prophets
fallen and faded into time
as windmills fallen to another
history’s ground
4
circles of stones, bones
drifts of dehydrated wood
parallel pores and pigments
of cellular life skin place
simulate in the elastin web
the bones and arteries of ancestry
5
locked over the earth’s flank
the weathered harnesses of seasons
ridden hard
the leathered leaves of succulents
suck at the mind like water
drawn inexorably inward
6
the earth cracks, curls
at salt-scaled edges like a snake’s
skin, its time come
to shed like human dreams –
the only evidence left to the passage
a rusted iron peg tied
with fishing line, a sharpened
stone axe flint
7
looking back
walking is reduced to
seconds between horizons
non-steps
along an interface between
invisible edges
of time
this place that absorbs
the past in a gaze
renders
to the untrod void
all futures
©Jennifer A Martiniello.
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freedom is…
not imaging
contours
black ink tracer wire
shot around bodies
like empirical corsets
not imaging
letters
indented like cuneiform
into clay
earth tablets for shattering
when re-scripted history
dries like drought
not imaging
story
skinned from its flesh
pegged out
a crucified shadow fixed
to fenceposts
still breathing
not imaging
terrain
in carcass cuts
parceled for display
purchase consumer
validation of inanimate
existence
freedom is
uncorsetting the boned
bent shapes of landscape
from her inscripted layers
…hearing her breathe
the wind
©Jennifer A Martiniello,2004.
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Creek Bed
1
erosion is a bored child
kicking dirt into wind
2
the schoolroom
is a flat red dirt floor
3
a willi-willi dances
the plain’s wide floor
in perfect circles
4
the circumference of knowledge
is harnessed in soft earth voices
5
the trees are staves
for the momentary tethering
of music
6
old bones
still sing under bark
and water
7
the creek bed’s verdigree
is a crease of wet sucked ribbon
8
old roots still cling
still suck
©Jennifer A Martiniello,2004
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tracking the perimeters
(‘tracking the perimeters of the ancient lake’ Suzette Boddington)
bone and shell relics
fragile as used
memories/inscriptions
on pre-loved tissue
paper for rock, ink
for sediment the lost deep
ground of water
ancient bodies, myopic
glass traces tunneled
from the cliff’s sky, its mirror
a drawing in languages
of found objects
©Jennifer A Martiniello,2004.
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Re(a)d Map for a Terrain
1
red stream slip–
stream tunneled air invisible
seduction of emotion
red as an autumn
highway by-way for treading
water red earth dust
layers of leaves
leavings traceless absences
deciduous as flames
on ice like carved
letters on glaciers
thawed graffiti red
ink wash on snow
read like a wound
a trace
forensic as fear
in the nostrils acid
rain fall
from grace
slippage from the high and dry
ground of pre-red
2
triangular invocations from
red toblerone
pencils
red slip-
side slip-tide tidal
as erasures from sand
red ice
letters written by the wind on curtains
squalls for knots
red soil red sand
oceans the tumbled scree
red gibber words
the schoolroom’s red
read room of words
read vessel
vein ventricle receptacle
pulsing red like light
from a dying sun’s bedrock
red rocks red stones red
tracks corrugated compressed
4WD herringbone
foot prints red scree
screened red wind lace
on cloth texts
red word mortared
hidden subtexts deceptively
benign as bleached lace
3
bleached beached lace
table tablet red wine stained
cuneiform spillages
from conversations red
read potlatch raft planks slipped
tonguewise
mid-ocean mid-
foot print red on red like graphite
snakeskins
coiled uncoiling
to the read metre between
laced borders edges
red edges red
as a marinara slip-stream
along a coastline
red continent edge
clustered coastal enclaves
of languages
read middens
of shelled and boned
dialogue
roped grammar knotted into
red continental shelf fringes
for hanging like curtains
read veils knotted from red-
veined penciled newsprint maps
for window terrain
4
terrain for a pre-
red landscape historio-topographical
window gazing
read view glazing
glazed gaze pre-read
flatbed black
armband slider for slip-streaming
microcosmic debris red
punctuation
red comma driftwood
colonial colonic carbon non-
datable
data red numbered
profile perimeters for ancient
lost lakebeds
redrawn for demographic
resurrection resuscitation reclamation
declamatory pre-red
re(a)dy reckoning
red requiem hieroglyphic
two-step
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Water
1.
water is blue
feather cape the soft slip
of fluid satin over nudity
2.
river is blue quill
string rib bones and bound
to land weave
3.
river is thin
rib-white boned body
talisman
4.
water lies shale-grey thin
strata’d layers of translucent
readiness to vanish
5.
drought is watermark calligraphy
conscripted to its stone
epitaph of edges
6.
lake is vessel
cupped container
dug from clay bed
is wheel
spoked curvature
ceramic blue rim glazed
7.
is grieving
the last soft scream
of reed-rush on wind
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Storm
1.
grey lake-talk day
duck swamped, dank feathered
as evacuated nest debris
washed down round
mute mouths
2.
hard rain-cry twig
brittle thin slats
a sky window barricade
bound by wind
and willow-mourning
3.
straight-jacketed
stormwater rainbows writhe
along urbanised
concrete-cracked creek beds,
arc and spill vertebrae
into old spinal curvatures
4.
wind-chop, white
foam on dishwater,
fish tinge of yellow
scaled to grey, lake-talk
gutted and spilled
on a stoned foreshore
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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At Clare Holland House
scar of birdwing on water,
kiln-rippled glass
lake sky, reed-rush breeze
braille codices on leaf and grass
lake-talk of pelican,
black swan, duck, blue jay,
the texture of spring silk-grained
as hand made paper
verseless, this writing
on air skin, the fluid nib
undefined as breath on breath -
but there
close up and personal
as a journey-line tattoo on soul
simultaneously terminal
and unending
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Red Comfort Road
walking Red Comfort Road is
dust soft, feet sink millennia
deep in desert
Red Comfort Road is
El Nino’s sister; grey rooted
with ice age varicose veins
her old-growth rain forest river run
is dry ice patterned into the land’s
body-scape, prehistoric vertebrae
bone crush into white ochre
Red Comfort Road is blood
and bone for spirit walking
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Ice-Age
1.
ice age
amniotic mineral tracer
strings unravel ancestry
ancient dna loomed lace
2.
land-leaf arterial
pulse maps turn
greywater mudflat
sluggish slowed still
discontinuous fragments
of creased black
ribbon grey layered
clay bed chiffon
3.
from the air
river is spinal curvature
sand-barred vertebrae
bared as human frailty
4.
waragamba is
body organ
drought starved
feeder streams
autonomic nerves
that distend
thin tangle claw-like roots
arthritic synaptic
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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Birthing Cloth
I
i am the flow of women’s dreams
i am the river of birth and death and story
my grandmothers’ grandmothers’ story
i am their incarnation upon the scripted hours
between
cycles between countries I am
the river’s ripple upon the green verge
that never ceases
i am the stone in the bed of its desire
from which the ripple is born
I am its echo
from the great Larapinta
that shivers upon the sand
where my grandmothers’ mothers
spoke the generations of the journey
i am each footprint
upon red gibber desert each breath
my grandmothers’ grandmothers
breathed in the sacred spaces of the dance
I am their country their
Women’s body
the course of life between cycles
i am the felt invisible
track of days i am
survival i am Dream
II
i am the great track of Dreaming
between daughters between the slow
and viscous lava of tongues
whose mouths speak in the silenced
spaces of invaded country i am
the seed blown by the winds
across women’s country into the bed
of stones scorched by invasion’s
hearth fire i am the ember
that leapt to the air’s flame
with the breath of my womens tongue
i am the spoken and unsilenced
after the long dark night
i am the mewling of the newborn
whose cry cannot be ignored
i am the cry that wakens the heart
in the dead of night i am the voice
that sings from the bed
of the oldest Creation on earth
i am its thought its song its
forever time i am the river
of children’s voices that does
not cease i am the cloud that rains them
from the great ancient memory’s sky
i am the sun that releases them
from ice the light that shines
upon them to make them grow
i am the great unemptied womb
of life
III
i am the pattern of life within the seed
in the palm of the hand of the Ancestor
that created my Women’s Law
the tongue that spoke it the song
that sang it the feet that danced it
i am the dust danced up from my
mother’s body in the dance i am
the ochred herstory that painted the journeys
in the deep earth of remembering
i am the mind that remembers
i have no ending time i am
continuous as the long search i am the shoot
sprung from the soil after the fire has passed
i am its spirit
that has not forgotten its roots
IV
i am the tear that seeps
into the dark earth in the drought
i am the colour that is released
in the wildflowers after the first rain
from the sky that makes me
V
i am the writing on the water
the seasons’ scripts of pollen leaf and
larvae that are the membrane
of the skin between cycles
VI
i am the sisters’ light in the Milky Way
the generations of the Pleiades
that star the heavens i am
the progressions of the great story
of the universe
VII
my body is women’s country
my grandmothers’ country where
the waterhole’s womb
is the eternal birthing place
VIII
i am the women’s silk that is
spun like the spider’s filament
glistening with the raindrops that hold
the rainbow after the sun
has fled
IX
i am the blueprint upon
consciousness that is forever
becoming into the world as breath
follows breath…
X
there is no beginning and no ending
without birth there are no births
without water the great waters
of the land and sky
there are no great waters without
the Ancestors who made the first
great birthing in the times
of Dreaming
©Jennifer Martiniello 2003.
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Word Search for Woman
Aim Alive All Avenger Aloof Amber
Aunt Ancestor
Body
Custodian Creation Circle Country Cloud
Dreamcaster Daughter Do
Earth Eternal Ethic
Fire Flesh Feel
Guardian Grave Gentle
Here Herstory Harmonious Hope
Intuit
Kin
Land Lawkeeper Lifegiver Laughter Lover Leader
Lace Loss Lubra
Mystic Mother Maid Magic Milk
Mediator
Nutrure
Ovum Oasis Ova
Rainsister Radiant Renewal Real
Sunny Starcatcher Spirit Sensual Story
Survivor Strong Seeker Soft Swift Seer
Singer Silk Sky She Softer Sea
Teacher Tears Tough True Test Tire
Umbilical
Vital Visionary Veil Vow
Waterweaver Womb Warrior Worker
©Jennifer Martiniello 2003.
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