Old Family Photos

 

In this picture I’m dancing

with my cousin Leo –

as kind as he was handsome.

I must have been 16. He,

older by seven years. 

Now I’m 86. He’s dead.

In this one, I’m a baby,

fat and round, like the beach ball 

posed beside me (a fashion

in baby snaps back then). Pretty

curls, pretty pursed lips, and 

a solemn, shrewd, appraising stare.

Here’s my young mother

in a long winter coat. The few 

trees are bare. Her dark, wavy hair, 

parted in the centre, is pinned 

back off her forehead. She is

holding me up to the light.

Here she is again, kneeling 

in an empty field beside one 

lump of rock. She’s draped it 

with McLean tartan. Red and green. 

Her father’s tartan. (I wonder

if I’m looking at Culloden.)

Of course, she was much

older then. That was the same trip 

when she and my stepfather posed, 

all dressed up – top hat, gloves – 

to attend, of all things, a garden party 

at Buckingham Palace. Such proud smiles!

There’s my little brother, with me 

and his best friend Roger, at The Gorge – 

showing off his balsa-wood boat, The Star,

which our dad made. We are standing

knee-deep in water. That same day 

The Star escaped, tumbling the rapids.

‘Stay there!’ said our dad, pointing

at the shore, as he set off to track it

all the way down to flat water. Only

the slender mast broke. But he found us 

crowded on top of a small, flat rock, 

oblivious of raging swirls. (No photo.)

We come to me in my twenties:

bridesmaid to a childhood friend,

then to my nearest cousin; my graduation;

then all those balls I attended with Don

whom I married first time around.

Even my own wedding.

The histories continued, but

the album comes to an end. This was 

the one I inherited after my mother died, 

the one she filled – mostly with pictures

of me. She wasn’t a cuddly mother, but,

after all, she must have liked me.

Written for Friday Writings #245: Family at Poets and Storytellers United.

Uninherited

I remember my father digging, 

foot on the spade’s top edge

pushing the blade further in,

Grandma twisting her trowel 

into the roots of weeds, 

breaking their tentacle holds,

and tiny me screaming, running

from a thick gelatinous earthworm –

never to be a gardener!

Written for Quadrille #246 at dVerse: a poem of exactly 44 words excluding title, which must contain some form of the word 'dig'.

Also shared with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #236, where we are invited to be inspired by one of the following quotes by Margaret Atwood, May Sarton, and Rudyard Kipling, respectively: 
1. “Gardening is not a rational act.”

2. “A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.”

3. “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”

The above wasn't inspired by any of them, having been written earlier, but seems to be right on theme anyway!

Looking Back

 

I see me small, on a vast lawn – a smooth green lawn surrounded by bushes, some of them berry bushes, others flowers. There are two huge weeping willows further down the yard, one on either side of the vegetable garden past the end of the lawn, beyond the wooden trellis summer-house.

I am all alone. The two-storey back of the house looms large and flat. My mother, upstairs, sometimes looks out the distant kitchen window to check on me. Her face is tiny, far away and pale, ghost-like.

Yet I don’t feel lonely. All around me the garden throbs with life. Insects are drawn to the flowers, small birds to the berries. The willow leaves, on their long dangling fronds that sweep the ground, rustle and toss, lightly and gently, in intermittent breeze.

I talk in my mind to clouds, to birds, to insects, to berries … to the rising trunks and curtaining fronds of both the soft green willows. I talk to the listeners under the ground and the watchers behind the sky.

When they reply, it is not as if to a small child. They answer all my questions, calmly. I feel rather than hear their answers. I feel, too, their assurance of my understanding.

My young mother, enclosed in the house, does, I think (I think in hindsight) feel fearfully alone … lonely …

Written for Poets and Storytellers United, Friday Writings #219.

November Tanka: Home and Family

(Decided it was time to play with this form again. But didn't think of it until November had well started.)

still wearing

my wedding ring

past his death –

the band thins, but

the gold remains bright

9/11/25

looking out

after sudden rain

what’s to find?

on the dying vine 

a single new bloom

10/11/25

I gift you –

brought by our Nana 

from India,

passed to Mum, then me –

these bracelets, Cousin

12/11/25

photo line-up: 

cousins, teens to babe –

decades on

oldest and youngest

become dear friends

12/11/25

morning porridge

childhood comfort food

thick and salty –

in old age I learn

to add cinnamon

13/11/25

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #203: Why I Love /Hate ... The prompt asked us to write about three things we hate and tear them down, and/or three things we love and celebrate them. It's my own prompt, but I have been busy the last few days marking my 86th birthday. (I always seem to have extended birthdays, courtesy of kind friends who want to take me out and do nice things for me.) So I haven't written specifically to the prompt, but I had already decided to play with tanka this month, and these first few kinda fit. They are certainly about things/people I love. Perhaps it can be inferred that I also hate the attendant loss (of husband, dying vine, the past, my own childhood) ... the  ephemeral nature of all things.

An Assortment of Siblings

Shared with Poets and Storytellers United, for Friday Writings #197: Sisters and Brothers. Rather than create something new, I collected together these writings, which already existed. Despite the note of sadness, I wrote the poems to celebrate these people, and their presence in my life.

Dear Denis –

I feel you slipping

out of my life.

Sometimes I forget

I even have a brother

over there in New Zealand,

a country more or less blank

to me: I’ve never visited

and cannot place you there.

Your box of Philosophy journals

moulders under my carport.

The joke statuette your colleagues made

lies on its face in my hall cupboard.

You said to throw it out, but if I do,

will you disappear entirely

out of my memory, except 

as that bright-faced child I knew

with his quirky way of looking at things?

Written April 1990, and published in Small Poems of April, Abalone Press (Three Bridges, Vic.) 1991.

Sister

When my father married your mother

we were already friends. Became

allies – against them.

You taught me to smoke:

puff, cough, sip raspberry cordial,

lie down dizzy on your bed.

We escaped to Melbourne,

you dragged me from studying to parties:

dancing in the dark to Nat King Cole.

Later we hosted children’s birthday parties.

Always talked for hours;

literature and theology, with coffee.

Wish you weren’t dead.

Written July 2008.

Cousin-Sister

Soon after you died, you came

to visit in my mind.

We sat together, children again,

talking as we used to

among tall ferns and grasses

and bells of pink heath

in that secret dell under the pines.

We always called it Paradise.

I wonder now if that in itself

was your message.

Otherwise, we said little.

Tied up a few loose ends;

agreed we were quits. Grinned.

Written August 2008.

My Late Adopted Brother

Bulky, deep-voiced, bushy-bearded,

smoker (both kinds), 

acquainted with drink.

How could he be an angel? 

Thus: 

           deep down 

a gentle, gentle soul

(words of a mourner

on facebook); the kindest, 

sensitive, most creative … 

deepest feelings (another);

his musical gift; and the way

he always had my back.

I like to think of him

pleasantly surprised,

finding himself there;

can well imagine he’d choose

to stay now, not come back

for another turn on the wheel.

Adios, Bro!

Written June 2019.

Notes:

Dear Denis.

Denis is my only birth sibling, four years younger. We are in no real danger of forgetting each other, even though we still live in different countries, and nowadays meet only on facebook and in the occasional phone conversation. This poem resulted in a visit from him soon after it was written! (Yes, he retrieved the magazines and the statuette.)

Sister.

My stepsister Merrie, who died in a house fire early in 1995. We met in our mid-teens and were very happy to become sisters, even though there was nothing else I liked about that situation. We continued to regard ourselves as sisters thereafter.

Cousin-Sister.

My cousin Suzanne, whom I was pretty much brought up with when we were little – always half-ally, half-rival, and mutual confidante – who died in the second half of 2009, following a long illness .

My Late Adopted Brother. Phillip (Phill) Barker: poet, digital artist and muso; my co-host for several years in the online groups Haiku on Friday and Tanka on Tuesday – first on MySpace, then facebook. We soon started calling each other 'Sis' and 'Bro', in unofficial mutual adoption, and would meet up for lunch or coffee on my Christmas visits to my old home city, Melbourne, where he lived. He always gave me a new notebook: a beautiful cover, and a practical size for toting about. 'Poets need notebooks,' he would say. Between times, we were in constant touch by phone, text and email. He died in June 2019, of a fast-growing cancer. We had a couple of excellent phone conversations in the days before his death.