Wings
Bright-brown-eyed I stood
there, then, waiting, watching
the bounce and stride and skirl
of schoolyards dipped
in clipped pristine propriety
that claimed the world and life
but not my mind, never that
that waited, watched and stood
aside, outside, wondering
where place and heart belonged.
White whirring, blurring faces,
children like wings
flutter past my face, and I
know I did not know them,
nor they me, though unsaid
conspiracy whispered we were one.
Bright brown eyes look out
from this skin and see
the songs and stories pass
down red silent roads in earth,
and they whisper long and slow and sad
in the gully winds at night
like waving, whispering, wanting grass
and I turn and find
pulsing silence stretch across the wind
in this place like a bird of prey
here, now, where I hover on child’s wings
at the edge of ancestry.
© Jennifer A Martiniello
Wings has been published in the ASA Journal (1997) and in The Universe We Are (1999).
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Lost Child
dreaming I follow
you the blood of evidence
traced in rock
on tired feet you track
forgotten people
blown away in a desert storm
two hundred pages long
in deep rock I lie
against my mother’s heartbeat
rigid in the cold
while the patterns of rotation move
slow and sad across the seasons
where the visible invisible
walk in shadows
beating the rhythm sticks of change
into white-mist winter air
crying I track
black ink ashes
down the corridors of legislative
dispossession
the blood of evidence
dark upon my skin
and I follow you my dreaming
into another place
where I
will not lie down
©Jennifer A Martiniello
Lost Child was published in the ASA Journal (1997) and in several other anthologies.
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Old Auntie
spits of conversation
splatter against brown brick
urban squalor
she shambles
slowly past song
into dementia
a bottle curved fondly
into clawed arthritic shape
wasted and spare
as autumn passing
a winter’s sentence
in a bare concrete cell
I heard you screech
slurred defiance back at smug
colonial control
meet conspiracy with non-cooperation
a glaring silence eloquent
with protest
but still they took you
heart country life and mind
all gone now
she shuffles watches
liquid-memory images dissolve
in the bottom of emptiness
©Jennifer A Martiniello
Old Auntie was published in the ASA Journal (1997).
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1967
the radio blares
his fifty-year’s bulk lies slumped in the front gutter
news flash music
the announcer clears his throat down the gaping
hall onto the street
the drink took the door off
last night with a pounding hammer fist
it lies like a drunken
gang-plank under news to shake the world
they voted ‘yes’
all ninety-nine percent of them
to count his grizzled hulk a citizen
oblivion rolls over in the gutter
last night’s friend
rolls away down his mother’s concrete skin
as celebration music skirts him
takes the air and warbles down the empty road
the announcer’s message repeating after it
like a rifle in the silence
©Jennifer A Martiniello
1967 was published in the ASA Journal (1997).
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Petrol Dreaming
petrol serpents fat with vapid venom
loop coil strike
at black earth sucked dry by rusted tins tied with string
the heart my country staggers
torched
run, child, run
the land is burning
the ridges are black and streaked with flames
your eyes
run red with sorrow
where the mulga broke
under two hundred years of sky
line taut, stretched out
the body of my country raked
by tin can teeth, the dogs
of death after you, run child
run while the ridges hold
torrent from annihilation
away into the sunset
the world is burning, the world is burning
and the land my body drowns
in the acrid fumes
©Jennifer A Martiniello
Petrol Dreaming was published in the ASA Journal (1997).
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Blackfellas Corner
this corner of the park
is a scrap of foothold scrabbled
back from the invasion
of manicured lawns,
migrant oaks, imported bulbs
that sector country like
immobilised bicycle spokes
splayed pathwise
from the bandstand’s hub
this re-appropriated corner of community
is where you sit yarnin’ up, watching whitefellas
walk other paths
©Jennifer A Martiniello
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The Speaking I Am
(for Lyndy Delian)
here I am
talking
the tape winding
winding the screeds of my tongue
into verifiable
space/time
start-pause-start-stop-start
pieces
of a present and past
afternoon with birds, kids
in the swimming pool splashing
the background on the other
side of bush and green
mowed grass
talking up the air
they breathe with the breath
others drew before them, me
sucking at the mouthpiece
like a scuba diver
for connection
between daylight and the dimming
depths a time capsule of stories
for a tank of oxygen
performing the same
miracle of life support…
and I talk and you
start-pause-question-start
the flow like a technician
checking for purity
and I talk between
start-stop spaces about
other places, other
lives that started the speaking
I am
©Jennifer A Martiniello
The Speaking I Am was published in Talking Ink From Ochre (2003)
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Women’s Country
(for Kerry Reed-Gilbert)
1
you ask/I talk
talk about
this country
this my
women’s body
I wear
my skin I live
from inside this my
country that carries
my spirit
mind heart
voice
talking
about this womens-mothers-daughters
body
I own
do not
mine/rape/exploit/scar/sell
this my
belonging country
is sacred
is not yours…
2
when I talk I give you
only the right
to respect
this body
give you
only the right to walk
where there are no
fences/injunctions/claims/mine fields
of massacres, sheep, cattle, crops
where you have not
drained
my blood, polluted
my rivers
tattooed your long blue
tar lines
on my skin
give you only the right to make
reparation
©Jennifer A Martiniello
Women’s Country was published in Sidewalk (2004).
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