Stopping Time

 Prison Suicide 1982

You had to go. I know you had to go. 

How could you have stayed, to moulder? 

(Would you have mouldered? I don’t know.

I know nothing. I know I know nothing.)

What good would it have done you to stay, 

seeing, only from Inside, the way the world 

would move, open out, the whole vast realm

of the Internet happening so soon – ten years

or thereabouts, in Australia. We might have sent 

emails! Would that have been allowed? What

do prisoners do now? How do the screws

keep track of words going in and out?

I don’t, I discover, see you ever getting 

away. Well, maybe when you were very old.

I’m old now. You’d always have been

younger. As it is, you are forever young –

you who grew old as time, in the time you 

served. At last you made time serve you,

cutting it off suddenly, interrupting 

no, not time so much as that place

where They wanted you to stay. Where,

having freed yourself, strangely you do stay.

Find the back story in my memoir, Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of darkness and light. Available as paperback from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. Soon to be available as an ebook on Amazon.

Writing the Prison, Yet Again

 (re my memoir about conducting poetry workshops in Pentridge in the early eighties)

For months and years

I’ve been writing the prison,

that place of darkness

which haunts me still.

An exorcism? A record?

A witness statement?

There are times I want to 

stamp on the memories,

feel them crunch under my boots

like broken glass – traversing 

yet again the stages of grief,

arriving again at anger.

But that’s temporary.

Let me instead celebrate

in these recollections

those who did not succumb 

to the institutional boot 

on the neck: those

who refused to break,

reassembling their own fragments

over and over again,

spitting them out as poems,

mending their shattered segments

with lines of gold, of light.

Written in response to my own prompt for Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #84: to be inspired by the phrase, 'Broken glass crunching under the boot steps.'

(My soon-to-be-published memoir begins with a long poem – quite different from this one –  called 'Writing the Prison'.)

Suggesting a Theme

  

'Grey hair' he said

and tilted back his chair

mentally counting, perhaps,

the ones on his head.

How many?

And how many years in here?

And ... 'what's the scent of parsley?'

(We'd talked of Dylan Thomas earlier.

'How's it above?'

cry Dylan's drowned).

          ******

Today in the prison poetry class

the men, all young, explained

why they grin in sorrow

why they laugh through pain.

W hat's the taste of vegemite?

Is Outside real by now?

We laughed until we wept.

He grinned in his tilting chair

and suggested a theme:

grey hair.

11/9/81

I've recently been sharing memoir excerpts about conducting poetry workshops in Pentridge prison a long time ago, on behalf of the Poets Union of Australia. At Poets and Storytellers United this week, Magaly asks us, in Friday Writings #38, to share something inspired by the phrase, 'to stay creative, is to stay happy and alive'. I'm not sure that's absolutely true, but it certainly helps! While this piece was not inspired by it, the prison poetry workshops were a case in point, even if the happiness was limited. Herewith a poem I wrote in, and about, one of those workshops.

Notes on the poem:

In workshops, I often call for suggestions for a theme that we can all  write on.

Those serving long sentences were oppressed by the thought that they were growing old in there.  

In the prison, tears (they explained) would have been seen as weakness, to make one preyed upon by other prisoners.

When I read them the poem later, the one who inspired it took offence at the idea he might laugh at anyone else's pain. But I meant they would laugh at their own – outwardly at least. So I have only just now, after all  these years, changed 'laugh at' to 'laugh through', and similarly 'grin at' to 'grin in'.

Writing the Prison

(After Anne Sexton: 'Ringing the Bells')

And this is the way we go
to work in prison
and this is the gate where we stand
still for the metal-detector and open our bags
and open the books in our bags,
and these are the writers in prison
who wait for Friday,
two hours a week that feel like freedom;
and because we are working in poetry
and because that’s another country,
an open space outside what is known,
we are the circle of laughing poets
who lounge in the plastic chairs in the Education shed
and smile at the baffled officers
who watch but leave us alone,
who watch us escape
the gates and doors with locks;
and these are the bluestone blocks we pass
on the way into the prison
guarded by guns as if it were true
we are not free, we are not free;
and these are the tunnels we walk on Tuesday
in maximum security,
cages that whisper open electronically,
whisper open electronically and whisper closed;
and this is how the poetry shouts,
as outspoken and bold
as a fearless child,
and this is always my freedom responding
to the words that respond to the prison
where poets write and are free
two hours a week, on Tuesday or Friday,
when the door in the wall cracks open
and lets me in, and we meet;
and although I may work and go
out again through the tunnels and gates and locks,
I am the one who will never
escape the prison.


Written in 1987
First published La Mama Poetica anthology (Melb. University Press 1989)
Also in Walking the Dogs (Pariah Press anthology, 1994)
Included in the author's Secret Leopard: New and Selected Poems 1974-2005 (Paris, Alyscamps Press, 2005).

Sharing now with Poets and Storytellers United for Friday Writings #34, where we are invited to write a piece including one or all of several words, including 'freedom'. I'm taking the liberty of choosing this piece, written long ago, not only because it is so much about freedom, but also because it directly relates to the memoir I've recently been sharing with P&SU.