Julie Liger-Belair, Claire Choong, Mathew Gostelo, Helen Grant

ENDINGS        

Claire Choong

The fields breathethe

first of their last

two million four

hundred thousand

and twenty three

inhale-exhales of air, loam,

soil, grass, leaf and tree

I stand, impotent

watcher,

knowing this terrain

will be overcome,

shifted and buried,

crushed into concrete

and pitiless roads

circat

wo million four

hundred thousand

and twenty three

vital, beautiful

,organisms lost,

terrified into

aberrant migration

or worse, crunched

under diggers

or worse

If I think of the rabbits

Oryctolagus cuniculus

I used to watch

and the birds

Corvus frugilegus et al

I used to hear

their names as spells 

will they endure

like the remembered dead

alive in the minds of others?

 ‘YOU WERE HERE’

Mathew Gostelow

Crimson ink on white card. Empty as grief. Blood and stone. Unfamiliar shaky scrawl. Graven marks on silcrete rock. ‘You were here.’ Ghosts of woodsmoke fly into the night.

No stamp. Bare feet on fallen leaves. Nor postmark. Ripe moon, apple-white. No picture. Lichen, honey-golden, clings to ancient, ragged stone.

Two weeks in mum's old bone-pale cottage – hillside remote. Silent, since the wake, but for the twisted floorboards’ creak. Loss follows, room to room. Spiders spin. Raindrops tear on windows. Apple trees, out back, make flailing dances in the wind. The standing stone, amid them, towers – pointing to the stars.

The card hums in her palm, alive. Voices mist, persist in piercing air. The hallway fades. Girls, awhirling, spin in joyous dance. Dust motes catch in amber light. Leap, take flight from dewy constellations. A clock ticks slow behind her. Blazing branches crackle in the night.

Head-swim faint, she’s braced against the wall.

Fire in your belly. Drumming in your breast. All creation, turning in your mind.

She hears a whisper in her ear – so close, so very quiet. Ecstatic shivers ripple down her spine.

You were here.

And so she was, somehow. Impossible memories stirred by this strange card.

Here when women danced in dark, and blood marked stone in daisywheel designs. Here when rites were sung and dry wood burned – that life may live, and die, and live again.

Yes, you were here – both then and now – a-dancing on the filaments of time. Connected by the spinnerets of things that last beyond us.

Outside, among the windfalls, one tear-wet cheek finds comfort on cold stone – cracked and cratered as the moon. Mother-touched. Her eyes drink ancient starlight, images of suns that burned when other daughters lived beside that rock. Their fingers echo, pulsing back.

You were here.

UNDER MARS

Helen Grant

Mars rises over Clynderwen,

where the sheep huddle

together for sleep. Faraway Mars

is flickering: a signal lamp

who’s message no one understands.

The moon sheds light

upon the slate tiled roofs

of cottages, and a single lamb

cries in the clear night,

under the unreadable signals.