Black Woman Standing
I didn’t die
and I would not leave
black child crying
black child crying
the land my mother
sees me
the sky my father
holds me
black woman crying
black woman crying
the cones of the banksia
and the crooked tree
bend like the grass
by the wind-driven sea
and the white salt stings
black tears crying
black tears crying
I will not die
and I cannot leave
the land my mother
holds me
the sky my father
sings me
in the songs of the rivers
the hills and the plains
across red desert
and tall mountain range
and our spirit stirs
black child crying
black child crying
out from the dust
of my drought-stricken land
the rain my brother
hears me
the sun my sister
feeds me
bright fire burning
bright fire burning
I cannot die
and I will not leave
black woman standing
black woman standing
straight as the paperbark
tough as the leaves
that bind my mother’s roots to me
and the wind my sister strides
over the black earth singing
©Jennifer A Martiniello
Black Woman Standing has been published in multiple anthologies by request, including black lives, rainbow visions: indigenous sitings in the creative arts (1999), The Universe We Are (2000) and the chapter Visionary Women in Talking Ink From Ochre (2003).
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Lunch in Alice
I sit under the Red Label
umbrella of an urban mask to hear
sky, water, tree, place, the stories
of my country from old voices rusting
to the red of blood and earth; I hear
half a memory sliced between
the rough-grain of which one’s daughter
never came back; that one’s son laid out
on concrete in a barred coffin, three this year
like slabs of fresh young meat spoiled
by the hotplate; hear the half of another,
how yellow paints other meat like quiet poison
and preserves it from white heat.
At Roxby Downs and Lucas Heights,
Jabiluka and the ANU they paint
black symbols on a yellow ground
to denote danger from fall-out; I hear
two old grandmothers whose voices
clack and creak and whirr on softly,
old technology drawing up artesian water
millennia-old to quench my thirst.
The courtyard dims, grows heavy under
dark cloud; it’s Lightning Brother weather
but we don’t go in. The waitress brings out
sandwiches– shredded lettuce, sliced tomato,
pressed meats between brown multigrain
on white plates.
©Jennifer Martiniello.
Lunch in Alice has been published in Southerly, Vol. 62. No.2, 2002, and several anthologies including Talking Ink From Ochre (2003).
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Air-Dancer
I
did I look for you?
I can’t remember. strange to think of it now.
in and out of a vast unfolding land where
we played the games of years,
changed the rules to suit the times we played in,
stepped softly around each other in secret places,
hiding seeking finding,
or did I?
II
I never could hide from you there was just a day when I
(did I ever seek you?) understood you had arrived
(find you?) in front of me
whatever day it was
III
are you rambling with me now?
can my pen lay you any barer on this day
than you’ve shown yourself on all those other days?
on that day
when the horizon tilted and spewed us out together into the world.
or on those every days since?
will you let me speak you now?
singular blithe air dancer on a fiery see-saw
let me reverse the fulcrum that we are?
singular blithe air dancer on a fiery see-saw will you let me speak you now?
IV
I remember those days in the schoolyard/
I can still see the cement floor of the lunch-shed/ crumbed and scattered like always-the-same sandwiches into non-entity/ its pale brick walls still enclose the smells of too-hot pies/ tomato sauce/ raspberry cordial and hot grubby children all squabbled and scuffled in sweat and dirt/ did anyone hear your part of me floating on the schoolyard air? memory is as mute a testimony as I ever was/
some memories
stagger and flicker
like old silent movies/
I can’t even remember the piano-player/
the old cart-horse understood/ arching his gentle neck over the fence at the top of the oval behind the log/ eyes that mirrored more mellow octaves than my mother’s piano/
I didn’t need you to speak me then/
handfuls of grass were more eloquent/ more fitting to soft companionable silence/
V
like those other days…
made sacred by childhood held enchanted by secrets …your silence then
never made you absent
I coloured you onto my paper. you laughed and sang me red and yellow and orange,
sighed green branches over my head in blue breezes,
lilted me rocking on wide oceans until the waves cradled me to sleep.
you draped my easel in all the costumes of my imagination, twisting,
turning in strange light, daring me closer to edges I couldn’t see …
only external worlds are flat you said.
I ribboned you in thin silver-grey lines into dialogues of privacy and adventure/ you stretched me as thin and as long and as wide as a rainbow serpent being born/ it curled iridescent around my sleeping place when the long gully winds moaned hot/cold down from the hills at night/ when it awoke the universe uncoiled itself/ it sung us alive.
VI
I never did understand those
blind white groping hands in anxious schoolyards/
drugged adolescence/
the angry, jabbing fingers of loud, fast techno-conscience places/
groping
frantic
trying to retrieve a few evasive shavings of themselves
in your other-created namesakes.
whole bodies of them writhe dismembered
as loud as dark red blood on pale white sand.
your namesakes scream so loudly their silence gags.
their rainbow serpents grieve.
I would not have wanted you to speak me in these dying places/
the sounds of soul-suicide are sad sounds/ I’m glad you never learned them.
VII
there was a bright orange day you sang me once, like an aria. when I discovered there are no edges to the universe. you chanted infinity in purple, colouring me the deep rich sound of my rainbow serpent on a summer night when the stars make me their voice - clear and bright and strong -
- I can sing you forever -
VIII
remembering you
is like being you
in sweetest voice
I was always the quiet one, hiding behind a mask of clay dug from under the feet of many places. I used to wonder, in the torrential rain of tempest years, how it didn’t wash away -
you drummed me into stillness
waiting suspended
the mask of my ancestors’ clay had nothing to wash away from.
the bright unclosed eye of my rainbow serpent reflected me like light -
as you reflect me bright and unclosed
IX
do others hear you the way I feel you
my blithe light air dancer?
I can feel your being from the centre of the universe.
my feeling you is the line that ties this occupied territory that lives and breathes
to my humanity that breathes and lives.
your ancestors are its voices.
X
no.
I didn’t look for you.
I look through you, as clearly and as deeply as I breathe.
you are my story teller. you weave me
with bright strands like many-coloured rainbow serpents drawing my land on my ancestors’ mask -
I face the world with you speaking me
©Jennifer A Martiniello.
Air-Dancer has been pubished in multiple anthologies, including Australian Spirit, Beasely,M ed, 2001.
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The Teacher
it clings
under the flesh, invisible glad-wrap
stretched tight to stop
bones falling out, something sacred unhinging
from its jamb when the winds
howl and batter at doors …
no humpy, this fella place -
his grin is a crease of stars in the dark
sky of his face, their eyes widen at the wonder
of the Milky Way so close
to Earth
as tight and tough as this concrete cast
on her body we’re sitting on, that skin
inside the one you walk around in.
can’t cut it, but it’ll bleed, though, if it gets
stretched too far, like us mob he’d say …
and the barefoot cluster of small bodies
would huddle closer
new black nebulae pulse against their
grey-pale pavement sky, a new universe warming
in the light of his dying sun
he can see which of them will be
the new suns in the firmament, which the shooting stars,
which ones the unstoppable, solid
planets born to their orbits
that sky up there, the galaxies, the stars, the suns
and moons all got that skin, invisible, that holds them
all together, one big belonging …
no humpy that fella place, he grins,
just like us mob
©Jennifer A Martiniello
The Teacher was published in The Imprint of Infinity (1999).
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To a Palawa Warrior
(for Japanangka Errol West)
one of the old
warriors is gone now,
shadowed to his Ancestors
in a grove of trees with
signs and music and prayers;
might have been
Druid, Gaul, Viking gone
bearded, white-headed and scarred to Valhalla
in a glory of flame, or exiled Ovid
absorbed with barely a ripple into the breast
of mystery and earth;
but he’s gone an older warrior still
than the odysseys a western history
inscribes, as old as Larapinta
carving her journeys from Creation
to creation, the verdant lands to desert
and beyond;
and so he’s gone
beyond the words and signs, the music
and the dance, beyond the battlefields -
gone home to Oyster Bay
and the laughing waters.
©Jennifer A Martiniello
To a Palawa Warrior was published in Crossing Borders, World Congress of Poets, 2002 and was translated into Arabic in 2004 by Lebanese poet Anis Ghanem.
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knowledge
my necklace seeds
are sprouting subtle
grooves appear divide
smooth shiny shells -
the black cleft of hearts
against themselves
golden yellow tendrils
like pre-birth antennae
wind out along the string
swell split black pods
between beach pearls
do not know they are
adrift from nature
the island women
say they don’t know
why my necklaces sprout
shouldn’t happen they say
once the seeds are pierced
and strung
in my grandmother’s country
earth is mother woman
is earth she lives from inside
the land like she lives
from inside her body
perhaps
it is in the nature of seeds
to know this
©Jennifer A Martiniello
knowledge was published in Passages, Parker-Doyle, L ed. 2006.
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for Christian, Ashmori and Ali
there’s a child in the nursery
sleeping with a sweet smile on his face
surrounded
with Pooh Bear, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and a silver
moneybox, safe
in his parents’ dreams of what they
know they can make come true because
his grandfathers
fought back
against the politics and prejudice…
and when he smiles he
smiles from his heart
there’s a child sleeping
in Lombok between prefab
walls on a sleeping mat laid
on the earth floor
and in the day her eyes are
wide with a wakefulness
limpid as the dark pools of her
mother’s pain when the doctors
said they had orders
said she couldn’t go
to hospital, and when
she smiles she hides her face
in the shadow of her
father’s bowed shoulder
there’s a child sleeping on a cot
in a concrete block
dormitory at Woomera surrounded
by patrolling guards with dogs inside
the barbed wire perimeter
and in the day he sits
in the schoolroom looking
out at his father’s desperation
railing at the fence, his learning
saturated with chalked-up
statistics
the salt and dark
lesions of their hearts’
journeys – and when he smiles
tightly to stop
the wound from tearing
he smiles from his heart
©Jennifer A Martiniello
for Christian, Ashmori and Ali was published in the Harmony Day collection, 2004, and translated into Arabic by Lebanese poet Anis Ghanem.
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