top and bottom

 top and bottom

Woolworths 

now there’s a counter to pick from

hesitation upon a wooden floor

around the oval counters

arriving back at one’s indecision

the serving girls floating

taking the proffered pennies

from sticky-handed pick-n-mix

kids with mothers in scarves

and gaping shopping bags

many doors pouring

in and out they came and went

how normal it all was

bottom Woolworth had a back door

steps arriving down town

Woolies

you’ll get it in Woolies

at the back on the counter

on the left 

of course

on the right 

were the records

for the likely girls

wooden 

it was all wooden

the scuffed floors

the shiny counters

where the tills rang time

and it was all over

the bag was broken

hundreds and thousands everywhere 

tears ran as snuffled fingers unstuck

those memories

sniff  sniff

too late now

the shop is closed

the girls are all old women

and i am just standing there

proffering my penny

Hatchery a pamphlet of poems by Elizabeth Osmond

Hatchery a pamphlet of poems by Elizabeth Osmond 

Elizabeth Osmond (a neonatologist) has a unique style that makes this the best poetry book I have read for a long long time.

The book is an an incubator of emotion where the child is superimposed upon the reflection of the clinician.

The poems are a series of petit mal that alternate between Elizabeth the person and Elizabeth the clinician. 

It is a rich vein of emotion derived from her care of her patients and almost seems to be a PPE against being infected with the vacancy of familiarity.

The language is as fractious as a crying baby until she picks up a pacifier and the reader is as satisfied as the writer is enthralled by it all.

I read her poems as a pastiche of recollections of her initial feelings when first walking a lace bridge over a chasm of her uncertainty that she has indeed arrived as a clinical practitioner. The caveats are well wrapped in the backward glances of her poems.  All through the threads from a clinical web of care glisten; her poetry highlights a pinnacle above the foothills of a doctor’s long journey.

She even describes dragging the minutiae of the clinic around the mundane day to day world outside of the hospital.  

Elizabeth has a feel for the history of her medical forebears and these are the grit in the oyster of many pearls of wisdom. 

Her book is available via the link below and I can thoroughly recommend it as a balm of understanding of the human side of stressful clinical experiences.

http://vpresspoetry.blogspot.com/p/hatchery.html

laugh ~ don’t make me cry

 laugh ~ don’t make me cry

taste the tears

happy or sad

they run the same 

but taste different 

have different constituents 

(so we are told)

different functions 

(so we are told)

but this i know

you cannot turn them on

only others can

you can stop them

yes or yes

you can dam them

build up a still lake calm

pressurise them until

shoulders heave

bursting

with sobbing laughter

look  just look now

all the chips are sodden

sod it  sod it

s   o   d       it all

jen

 jen

i see a wire

a long wire

at one end there is a myth

at the other a plunger 

you know

the type they wind

then depress to explode

the myth sky high

heads up 

eyes widening

as broad as your smiles

ownership 

of the dynamite

is such an aphrodisiac 

jim 

nostalgia ~ not all it was cracked up to have been

 nostalgia ~ not all it was cracked up to have been

i remember 

when nostalgia 

was all i had left

past caring

i stopped   just there

and turned back

the pages un-reading 

the book’s end unraveling 

it’s beginning beginning to show

how threadbare nostalgia is

not at all what i thought was was

or ever would be

but me crossing over

a zzz in the garden

 a zzz in the garden

many are the shapes of sunlight 

in the ranges that curve the air 

the sun is long over the yardarm

and i’m asleep in me garden chair

straw boater set at jaunty 

the weather set long and fair

the bees are asleep in the foxgloves

and i’m asleep in me garden chair

the king and him

 the king

and the american president 

are not afraid 

fool’s gold rushes in

where angleterrs fear to tread