Wandering Through the Prison

I am there in the walls of Pentridge

among the other ghosts. 

The face of my younger self

floats in and out of the stones.

I walk down the old paths

between the flower beds 

and in through the door

of the small prefab classroom.

But the paths and the classroom

are long gone, ghosts now as well.

Tourists who come are unaware

of that old reality’s exact details.

Ghosts of my friends linger too, 

brothers of my heart, my students

who taught me more than I taught them:

their younger selves, surviving.

I’m glad the place was closed. 

It carried much evil and only

a little good. Was evil in the men I met?

Perhaps. More in how they were treated.

We are all gone from there now,

out into other lives — except the one

still imprisoned. Except that other one

who died. Do we still meet in those corridors?

I like to think that even after I’m gone

to wherever we go when we leave,

some fragments of the selves we were

linger, weaving love through those old stones.

My Unbearable Silence

or, Why I’m Not Writing About Wars and the Extinction of Species

My unbearable silence

will not let go of me.

Words choke in my throat.

The poems don’t stumble

or fall – they are paralysed

before they start. Horrors

we can’t help contemplate

strike me silent. It’s not 

that I don’t want to cry out

against them. To scream or sob

would be release, if only

in that moment. To yell outrage

might at least make the point,

even to those who refuse to listen:

they could not afterwards say

that the words were never said.

But the saying dies inside me

before being born, in the face of 

all the words said by others, unheard.

Written for Poets and Storytellers United, in response to Friday Writings #144; To speak up or stay silent? in which we are invited to consider a poem by Rajani Radhakrishnan. My title here, and the reference to stumbling and falling, quote that poem.

Tableau of My Street

Two magpies warbling

in the sunny day

soar across my street,

my little hill street

beneath the mountain

and the great clear sky.

In all the gardens

lining my calm street,

trees and more trees reach

high and wide. There is

an ease, a leisure,

in their space, their spread.

The magpies, too, are

blithely unhurried

although gone too soon

with their liquid song,

guided by instinct

as their lives require.

They won’t go as far 

as the mountain. That

is home to eagles.

Those, I love to watch

riding the currents

of the lofty winds.

But that’s memory:

an earlier street

the other mountain

and my love, who was

alive then, watching

beside me, smiling.

This town surrounded

by mountains and birds,

and everywhere trees,

delights me daily. 

In the long nights, still,

I know myself blessed.

Sharing with Friday Writings #143 at Poets and Storytellers United. 

Off prompt. Instead I'm pinching a recent form prompt from dVerse: the tableau poetry style. (The instructions say 5 beats per line, but examination reveals them to be not beats but syllables. Beats in a line of poetry are usually understood as the stressed syllables.)