On a rainy day at Laura

 

Succulent flowers from a pot on or back veranda at Laura,

drawn as a diversion on a rainy day.

OLD MAC

Lean, 

a shock of greying hair,

eyes as clear as the mid-day sun,

a hand so steady

that he could smoke a cigarette

down to its butt, unstubbed.

“Old Mac”.

 

I had known of him

since childhood,

when my father had

told us of

this legendary Scotsman

he had met out bush.

 

Some twenty years later,

back in the bush myself,

Mac was still there,

true to my father’s description.

“Old Mac”.

 

Engaged initially

to care for indigenous groups

at risk from atomic testing,

he had continued on

as consultant, adviser, friend,

to the old men of the desert.

 

Sometimes you would hear

that he was coming –

sometimes not.

Mostly he would just appear

out of the desert,

stay for a few days

and then move on.

 

At times,

he would visit for a meal,

but never to stay,

always sleeping

in the back of his truck –

his “boudoir”.

 

Eventually

retirement came, and death -

with plans for

Mac’s ashes to be scattered

by a bush cleric,

in the land where

he had lived and worked for so long .

 

But fate

or perhaps Mac

prevailed.

A shoe-box of ashes,

an elusive cleric,

a rugged bush vehicle,

and a rough bush track

found  Mac

scattering himself - 

“Old Mac”.

THE SCAR

The old church was a wreck,

just bush timbers

and lime washed bags

with a few sheets of iron on the roof.

 

The only person

we ever saw there

was a drunk

with delirium tremens.

 

Karaknya and I

went there one day,

cut a mark on our thighs

with some broken bottle,

exchanged blood

and rubbed in red desert dust

up above where it would be seen –

our secret.

 

The mark has faded

over the years

but is still there.

 

Our lives

took us different ways,

to different places

and we lost each other.

 

I had always meant

to renew the friendship

some day – sometime,

but somehow never did,

even after I found where Karaknya was.

 

Perhaps I was afraid of what I might find

or just unwilling to take the risk.

 

Whatever,

Karaknya has gone now.

Just the scar

and the memory

remain.

From my window at St Andrews Hospital - August 2020

 

MY LITTLE SISTER

My little sister, my twin,

You were beautiful they say,

perfect, but dead, still-born,

strangled by my navel string.

 

My mother grieved for you

all her life,

never knowing where you were;

perhaps a hospital incinerator,

perhaps an unmarked grave,

perhaps unacknowledged in the foot of a coffin.

They all happened back then.

We have searched but never found you.

 

You are on our parents’ headstone now,

a memory without a name,

but there, a treasured memory.

 

Me?

We have twin grandchildren, 

girl and boy like us,

now young adults.

I take such joy in them

but grieve too

for what we might have known.

 

My little sister, my twin,

You were beautiful they say,

perfect, but dead, still-born,

and all my life

I feel that I have lived for us both.