Award-Winning Poetry by Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello

This Poetry Portfolio presents poetry that has won awards, commendations or been shortlisted for major awards.

Inevitable Grace
(tribute to Emily Kame Kngwarreye)

your face
is the grace a harsh life
bestows on its survivors, each crease
a bar whose notes, escaping their dirge,
run for the high octaves like a bird
to a joyous freedom once the doors
of the cage are broken

deep-coloured as the millennia
sediments that scar the cliff faces of sacred country
your face is as ancient a bed to flowing water
carving its agelessness into the land the way
wisdom enscripts its elusive dance upon
humanity

and I watch you
slowly measuring out the journeylines with a finger
brushed with red earth and hear the dust
that others only see as a place to put their boots
open its voice and speak,
see your hand on the cave walls where they
have held the ochred spirit in the rock for all
eternity, and watch how the sun shifts
to accommodate your shadow, effortlessly,
day after day without tiring

I watch you bend
your face to greet the waterhole, see
how your laughter is caught up in the transient
ripples and released without possessive grasping
to share you with reed, tree, sky – how you
and it are the same manna
born in the same creation

I see… beyond the verticals
and horizontals of skin the hundred boys who’ve
died in custody and whom you’ve mourned, the warp
and weft of sorrow in your face for all the young women
whose eyes do not know their country or their mothers
but whose children still belong to your body – how your skin
stretches to embrace their homecoming with every
carefully recorded story, mother, son, daughter,
place and time – the same way your smile
stretches other boundaries

sometimes beyond comprehension
and lesser visions restrained to the finite byte
of desert stopover, campfire talk, a desperate camera-clutch
at a surreal otherworld that fail to distinguish how you
rise from earth, become
ancestor, mother, daughter, grandmother, granddaughter,
terrain, sacred physicality – fail to see
how the one spirit makes you blood and rock, well
and water

your face wears the intaglio of embattled anguish,
betrayal, theft, deceit, massacre and grief survived–
and when I remember the zealot piety and passion
of ANZAC, two world wars, Korea, Vietnam,
I remember also that you witnessed all of them
for nine generations and more; and as I watch you
bend to trace creation in red earth with a finger
more purposeful than Michaelangelo’s Sistine god’s
I see a light more eternal kindle in those you teach,
see each one, mirror-like, reflect the tireless radiance
of an inevitable grace

©2000.Jennifer A Martiniello

Inevitable Grace won the 2002 Banjo Paterson Poetry Prize and was published in Stories Without End, Southerly, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2002 under the title ‘Emily Kngwarreye’.

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Requiem

under the belly of the wind no sleep dares rise
to meet the careening cadences, shred to ribbons by sharp
winter leaves; no dream but that which seeks
shelter from the stripping, its sanctuary a mirage
on the edge of far dawn

this night the Ancestors play the ridges and the gullies
like a keyboard split between Beethoven and Mussogorsky, and they,
the virtuosos who have practiced since Creation
upon the earth do not miss a single note…

in still morning
the stockmen ride out to check the artificial face
of habitation, quiet in their knowledge… last night the Old Ones
strode the earth again, last night beneath the hidden
embers of an angry sky they took
stock – and exacted payment

in this after-night Debussy might have laid
his fingers on the wind and played a different landscape –
quiet and eternal – without a single scar to mark
its velvet skin, nor stubbled treble to encroach
upon the silence of the listening ear

…and in the squatters’ huts
the dogs lie still as death upon the earth with knowing, will stay
until the last dark fire greys to ash with only a quarter-arch
of eyebrow for the ghosts that even God and Fauré
cannot stop from coming home

©Jennifer Martiniello, 2002.

Requiem was Highly Commended in the CJ Dennis Poetry Prize, 2002.

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Earth Songs 6: Weereewa

loose-limbed between the rims of a tipping
saucer, earthquake edges from
millennia ago, you cling and clamber
crests held down by your rootedness,
the sky a fickle thing of moods, a lover
nonetheless in bondage to your blackened
strips of skin, the leather of a flayed season

that’s why they shy away, the raw
reminder of reductionistic states, their own
unaccepted distillation to uneven ground
like a baby on the teeter of its ungripped feet,
the earth not yet familiar, and never will be,
its predictability stripped, replaced
by the intangible, the tactility of shadows

but they still come back
in their seasons of curiosity and leisure,
drawn by your tragedies, sublime
mysteries like junkies to a dissolving
substance in their veins that tips the world
on its many heads, the middens of their minds
as fraught with silences as an unopened tomb,
the straggle of your tree-pegged roots like
hieroglyphics waiting for translation

and somewhere some miasmic meaning slips
between the seer and the seen in a language limping
through the gaps of words, branches, grasses, syllables
hanging broken from a lightning trunk of thought,
or lifting like the curling bark unspoken forms
intuited, then severed from their swelling sap

to be preserved in phrases, paragraphs, in undecided
frames for mental galleries and journals, museum

pieces for display like poetry on plinths,
prose on walls in carefully curated combinations
abstracted from the clinging skin of a moving earth


©Jennifer A Martiniello

Earth Songs: Weereewa was shortlisted for the 2003 ACT Poetry Prize.

 

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Night’s Paper Lantern

cursive traces lie like shadows
of script under the paper, the pen
inches sighs and slants slowly as if to reconstitute
a diaspora of words fleeing from the world
in exile, political refugees distraught by changing
borders etched into the living ground of mindful
existence

the cell of his prison has paper walls, guards
of conscience pacing the bars on an hourly schedule
as he hunches over mandates, scratches his frail
tracks into the grimed surface of free thought, ever hopeful
of the amnesty that will strip away the fear,
bring new followers to the faith unafraid to trace
his heritage

daily other countries pace his plush carpet,
approach the demarcation line of his shining oaken desk
to proffer pleas and protests to the effigy of suit and tie,
the diplomatic mask of his survival patinaed to his face –
mock-bronze, the regulated statue with
living eyes

daily the passion of his pen
sinks to the splutter of official duty, hides
the trail of words escaping from incarceration under an
official seal, and waits for night’s
paper lantern

©Jennifer A Martiniello

Night’s Paper Lantern was runner-up for the CJ Dennis Poetry Prize, 2002.

 

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Autism

his fingers are a shadow
play on walls, the frieze
of daffodils and dinosaurs, puppets
jerking to the string of what
might have been
her face in shadows bends
over the cot, she smooths
his wayward hair
his fingers mime his
eyes, their dance fixed to a far
fascination inside his head, outside
her face seeking desperately
to enter, she gropes at the locked
gate of his mind
his fingers are soldiers marching
marching marching the rigid
repetitions of fences, perimeters, edges
walking him, laying him down like
an unfixed demarcation zone between
her face and his, their
worlds like border countries, inseparable,
divided
his face is a rocking horse
to and fro, to and fro he rocks
himself clutching the mane of her hair
and her fingers
are shadows playing at the outer rim of vision

like the whispering of flowers from an unopened spring


©Jennifer Martiniello

Autsim was Highly Commended for the Society of Women Writers 1999 Meeking Poetry Award.

 

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at Gunghalin

marbled to a rising
interjection, your name,
brief - initial, surname, a trailer of other
bronzed first names in relief

inscribes your once in flesh
and blood hereness in this other-place
air, hung invisibly, finally
with the last post

I walk green
cushioned on blades
that serrate the lifting
sky from earth

bedded history
from Ancestor, remembering
the air of that other
other-place planting

childhood and your strong firm
stride up onto the hill from the left
behind plateau, the sound
of your breathing beside mine

the shared and unstained
air; I walk and breathe
in the damp autumn’s delineation
of once and other

annotations in neat rows,
stop and bend, as those appended
to their own bronzed and marbled histories
also stoop

to sound the spaces in between
dislocated letters, sift, decipher
inscripted time for bedrock,
genesis for immortality

©Jennifer A Martiniello

at Gunghalin was shortlisted for the 2004 ACT Poetry Prize.

 

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Invitation
(for Rich Pascal)

come and talk you
say full of new
found passion for the song
about
Aboriginal poetry…

an invitation
to slice the voices
old-way song cycles squared up like
black ant tracks in frames and cut
to the page like bread
delivered from the tongue
hot

how shall I
sing artesian water
to crumbs for a white palate make the black ink
gel from its ancestor ochre
still the liquid sun without
the stilt of shadow?

but I will come as I
always do with the voices
in my head their laughing
tickling up the ribs inside
my skull
the lamenting
sighing in the still tall grasses
down along Sullivan’s Creek

and I will play the wind –
flicking up the sounds
of ancient tongues into air again
play the minstrel bard
Chaucer only dreamt of that long
track after

and I will pluck from time
the quills of an eternal scripture born
of land invasion redemption resurrection
dark-inked into the blood
like resistance
in the magnetic field of the macrocosm


©Jennifer Martiniello.

Invitation was shortlisted for the 2003 Act Poetry Prize.

 

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My Grandmother’s Glasses

my grandmother’s glasses
wiry-armed perspectives, black-rimmed and round
gaze out from yesterday’s mantelpiece
beside a Mackennal bronze figurine

their turn-of-century telescopic eyes
saw bright paddocks felled to barrenness,
for progress’ sake,
lit lamp-light under tin and timber,
raised vegetables and fruit, children
and flowers, all organic, healthy
under brazen skies

read Plato and the Oxford Dictionary,
developed film in a lean-to bathroom
under electric light, watched
two world wars and industry
thin minds and hopes and hearths

held Menzies and his politicians
fathers of the nation, watched them
rewrite a history after their own image,
closet human rights, free thought and equality
along with gays and lesbians, all wrapped
in a shroud as sun-bright white
as her sheets

saw a man walk on the moon while children
starved in streets and slept in Vinnie’s bins,
saw television and technology get a grip
on bored minds trammelling for something new,
progress a novelty on take-aways, the only necessity
entertainment and making disposable ends meet
while a lifetime of socially-designed spectacles
changed shape and frame, colour and strength,
their field of vision over time reground
to safe, economically-tested populist formulae

my grandmother’s glasses,
wiry-armed, black-rimmed and round
with turn-of-century respectability, conservative
in style and gaze, with chamoised-to-lustre
patina in classic Eurocentric mode, the influence
colonial,
are back in fashion now


©Jennifer A Martiniello

My Grandmother’s Glasses was Highly Commended in the 1999 Courier Southern Cross Literary Awards.

 

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