jan dean

Canola At Cowra

Yellow flowers and green stalks enmesh chartreuse.
Chartreuse craves and takes attention.
In Spring canola drapes Cowra’s outskirts
with brazen women reclining on couches
mouthing Mae West one-liners. Rasp
with a dash of honey. We can’t avert.

Chartreuse, the colour of absinthe
had everything to do with Van Gogh
Toulouse Lautrec and Gauguin.
Nude models slumbered on chaise lounges
while they stood gazing, a paint brush
in one hand, a glass of absinthe in the other.
It drove them wild.

Canola at Cowra is published in Social Alternatives (2001)

Seeds

Addressing an Ancestor, Elizabeth Rymes, 1773-1841

Lately we’ve had so much rain, mould
penetrates the long-handled loofah
hanging in my shower. Dark stains
spreading through exquisite patterning
of pores may be unstoppable.
Should it be discarded or placed in the sun?

You and your life oscillate precise, obscure.
Some recorded, the rest shadowy
as a flooded river.
Once I was chuffed by my convict stock
dreaming you the delicate weed
plucked from a dingy Spitalfields lane
transplanted to flower in a special place.
Now there is sorrow.
White invaders plundered and raped.

Did you understand?
When your husband was injured
in May, 1804, harvesting maize
sweated from a field of stone
the spear was thrust by a man displaced.

Finding your grave could I suddenly be
overwhelmed by your spirit, given answers?
One thing I do know we are yours
branching endlessly. English cold
and murkiness, now sheer memory.

We were mistletoe
taking space, food, warmth and light.
We had no right.

Seeds is in The Uncontained Sea (2000 Roland Robinson Award)

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