Tuesday, November 27, 2012






Thursday, November 22, 2012



A Fig Tree Joins the Singing

Five years ago an Italian family
walked the park near the road where I live,
their big hands filling buckets with figs.
Then the park was suddenly bereft of the tree
and the family, as if the ritual was now only
a ghost of my morning walks.

I told myself they had flown back to their
home country. Later, I noticed the fig tree
hacked to a stump. Tractors were mowing the soccer
field in all directions. Every now and again, magpies
anchored their beaks into mown grass,  a kookaburra
laughed,  and galahs waddled their pink and grey silks,
crunching and moaning at the same time.

Two years ago, a limp wet rag. One year and the fig 
tree is sprouting a sweet politeness, overshadowed 
by a large gum. I thought they might be tree buddies,
as if the older eucalypt was playing God, protecting
young Adam's first cloth. The tree rising up
from earth, the hole at the base of the fruit
as an exit for sweetness to its puzzle inside.

The ostoile, as they call it, drips nectar for ants
and birds. When green skins purple, they signal
a store of jam for the old families who've seen fig trees
explode from the treads of tanks, or simply die
in the ground poisoned by war.  
When figs ripen in the southern hemisphere
the last fruits are withering in the north.

Vandals posing as gardeners had put the tree down,
today it labours skyward, a phenomenal thing reaching
to meet green parrots dropping seed husks,
the fruit's tiger-stripes curving at the apex,
and the mud universe of wasps waiting
bat-like above the fingers of ovoid petals.
It only takes minutes for the queen to lay eggs
for a symbiotic hatching of pink florets.

Why did it receive so much attention?
So what if figs fell and decomposed?
So what if caved-in flesh became projectiles
under shoes? So what if neighbouring Italians
acquired God's free gift? The old women up
in the branches disappearing into their scarves. 
Who was the ripeness for, anyway?
If this tree could speak do you think
it might say more than massacre or theft?

There is a stillness at present in the park. Every once
in a while magpie larks let out a 'too-wit', and parrots
rebound in overtones. You know that the tree
is reaching out from beneath its host, waiting
for the old women to return with Italian songs,
and the men with their heads and shoulders
in the clouds, sluicing juice into gaping mouths.

Even the tree gives out its milky sap
strengthening its ancient ceremony
of renewal, lifting its course to the green fields,
the pink-and-grey maps of the parrots' wings.
And underneath that overshadowing eucalypt
with all that rattling going on above, is the fig tree
of leaf, of man, of woman, rising up from the earth
to join all that singing.


Monday, November 19, 2012



I have always loved the word "Appaloosa"
                           after Judith Beveridge

I have never shown kilometres of the garden
to the Garden Gurus or Gardening Australia.
They have never caught my hues of Cineraries, Roses,

Magnolias, or Chrysanthemums that lie in yellow hoops.
They have never wandered through my garden with
a camera lens hung from tilted lights, that might
behold Hepatica, Melleluca, Limonium bush,

stroking it as you would a Percheron horse.
I have never called my plants Tequilana,
Eremophila, or Leptospermum. Such scientific,

trifling names one can never remember them.
I have never used potash, alkaline magnesium,
dynamic lifter or bleach (that reddens the nose).
I only use nature's spurs and silks from the

horse manure in the compost heap. I have
never picked Dryandra from the neighbour's
fence or lifted Wexford apples bouncing on the

hedge. I have never sold my orchids at the village
fair, touchy-feely hands on their perfect growth,
but I do keep bees, those busy little maniacs
harvesting honeycomb. Yet none of this shows

thumb or green unless I share and show; a star-
burst of colour on the page. Ah, but  more than
this, I have always loved the word "Forsythia."
 




Saturday, November 10, 2012




Camping Out                                             
                     For Emma Chisit


Strewth! It looks like a dog's breakfast. Eiche nardly bleevit.
Tent's karked it and the billy won't boil. Stubbies and tinnies


around the camp oven and the donk's gawking holes where the
egg nisher was. Course, we gave it a burl, four by four, flat to the


boards, chucked a u-ey at the creek, hit a roo, some thingamajig,
whatchamacallit, black stump dooverlacky. Nardlyseeit. Jerry can


sweatin' like a wet season of petrol, so charged, engine's cooked,
clapped out. The big smoke's ten miles off, as the crow flies.


And Strine's stronger than a scorcher, out the back o'bourke,
somewhere near bulamakanka. Yobbo, gives me the ear bash,


spits the dummy, downs the amber fluid. Says, don't come the
raw prawn with me, this is a kick in the teeth! We can make tracks,


I say, give someone a tingle. I was zony sane lar snite, it's not like
the old days, eating cackle berries, having one with the flies,


cuppa near the Murri. Aussie skies like a blue soft road, sweet
silk moon spreading sheets of light, night barking like an owl,


keen as mustard at the old hanky panky. But tomorrow'll be the
same. He's weaker than a sunburned snowflake. Icon ardlywait!


Old wobbly boot, up the creek, picking off pink galahs with his
beebee gun, crook as a chook, laughing in a technicolour green.


Jeer that noise? Wodger reckna itiz? - Corrugated road, road train
hurtling down the tracks. Gotto go, get me swag, cooey!



This poem is written in "strine". When a challenge came to write in another language
& not remembering my high school French, I decided on Australian slang!

Sunday, November 4, 2012


Bounty

Bounty
Prose Poetry

The Five Lives of Ms Bennett

The Five Lives of Ms Bennett
A Family Saga

The Ozone Cafe

The Ozone Cafe
White Collar Crime

The Last Asbestos Town

The Last Asbestos Town
Available from Amazon

Evangelyne

Evangelyne
Published by Australian Poetry Centre, Melbourne

of Arc & Shadow

of Arc & Shadow
Published by Sunline Press, WA

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MBA (Wrtg) ECowan

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Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Helen Hagemann holds an MA in Writing from Edith Cowan University, has three poetry books: Evangelyne & Other Poems published by Australian Poetry, Melbourne (2009) and of Arc & Shadow published by Sunline Press, Perth (2013). Bounty: prose poetry is published by Oz.one Publishing in 2024. She has three novels published The Last Asbestos Town (2020), The Ozone Café (2021) and The Five Lives of Ms Bennett a result of her Masters degree at ECU (2006), is published by Oz.one Publishing (2023).

Helen Hagemann MBA (Wrtg): ECowan

Helen Hagemann MBA (Wrtg): ECowan
Author & Poet

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