Author: Elisabeth

Poetry

I took my notebook and pencil in my pocket and scaled the back fence. My mother was at work down the road at the old people’s home and my father sat alone in front of the television. My sisters and brothers were scattered throughout their rooms.

A voice in my head called out to me,

‘You must find nature.’

I hankered to go out in someone’s car to the countryside, to be among the green hills, the trees and the sheep, but all I could manage was a long walk down Farm Road to the as yet built Farm Road Estate.

There was a point along the way where the concrete on the road stopped and the path was made of gravel. At that point I knew I could turn my back on the houses and streets filled with cars and people.

In front of me the skyline was dotted with Lombardy poplars and pines. Tall majestic trees that forced my eyes upwards to the clouds and the sky.

I was priming myself for the life of a poet.

On one side of Farm Road a cyclone fence protected passers by from the golf balls that flew overhead on the Cheltenham golf range. On the other side, a long line of dilapidated sheds gave off a stench of long dead chickens. These, too, I saw as a last line of humanity, after which the countryside, once row upon row of market gardens now abandoned in readiness for the housing estate, prevailed and I was free to find a spot, a tree against which I might rest, take out my notebook and with pencil in hand, write down my lofty thoughts.

The very act of writing down the words, inspired by the skyline, the lapping of leaves on top of the Lombardy poplars, the thought that they once came from Italy, their forebears a sign that the world outside was vast and immeasurable, and I became an important someone in this universe because I was a poet who could write down words in my notebook and the hours and hours of wasted time, spent during the summer holidays doing nothing but killing time would come to measure something of worth.

‘Hi,’ a voice called to me across the fence. A man in cap with a caddy and golf stick. He called through the wire, and I wondered, had he lost his ball?

My brothers sometimes came here, too. But not to write down beautiful words. My brothers came to crawl through the stubby grass on the edge of the road to look for stray golf balls that had somehow managed to get over the cyclone fence. They took them to the golf course manager at the clubrooms in the centre of the golf course where they could trade the balls for money.

I looked at this man and felt a flicker of annoyance. I did not want him here. I did not want anyone here. People interfered with the flow of my thoughts.

I was like Wordsworth, a man worthy of words. I was the creator of glorious scenes from nature and brought their beauty alive on the page.

‘What are you writing?’

Annoying question. None of his business. But I had been brought up well. Not so much that I did not speak to strangers but that I would offer something of my more polite self without interfering with my intentions.

‘Poetry,’ I said and turned back to my page by way of dismissal. Wordsworth never had to put up with interruptions like these.

IMG_2486

The author as would-be poet.

The journey out

The year my father died, I became a mother for the first time. My father came to see me in the hospital, a day after I had given birth. He came with my mother. She had pressured me to give birth sooner than I could simply because she wanted to go away to Canberra to meet with her eldest son.

She and my father had been estranged from this son for years and now it looked as though he would welcome my parents back into his life. The fact that I was about to give birth mattered less to my mother than this opportunity to reconnect with her first-born. It also mattered less to her that my father, whose lungs had collapsed with emphysema, might not manage the journey. They were going and that was that.

I stopped answering my mother’s calls. It annoyed me that she feigned interest in how I was going when in fact all she wanted was to see me birthed. The doctors had given me a due date a week earlier and as each day passed I grew more and more frantic.

When my baby was born at last, and my mother gushed into the ward to see the twelfth of her eventual twenty-three grandchildren, I found the greatest pleasure rested, not in her response to my little girl, but in my father’s.

He sat on a chair near the bed and looked on as my mother bubbled over. He did not ask to hold my baby but gave a big smile when I peeled back the blanket from her face. After only ten minutes, he excused himself. It would take him at least ten minutes to get back to the car park. My mother could stay and talk to me while he made his way out.

I watched him as he struggled along the corridor. Twice, he stopped and sat in a chair propped on one side. Twice, he looked as though he might fall over with the effort. Twice, I watched him draw breath back inside his lungs before he had the strength to move on.

And then he was gone from view.

Nine days later he was dead.

We buried him in the Cheltenham cemetery, behind a fence that led onto a golf course. At one point during the burial, my daughter started to cry and my husband took her away from the people scattered around my father’s open grave.

He decided to lay her out on a flat gravestone so that he could change her nappy. Someone called out over the fence when they heard the sound of a baby. A golfer who was alarmed perhaps that things were not right and my husband reassured him.

‘We’re burying her grandfather.’

Scan0043

And so these two events are cemented together in my memory, birth and death together. The old making way for the new.