Mirror: New & selected poems

By William Cotter

Bill Cotter’s poems and stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines throughout Australia. He has won a number of literary awards, including the International Library of Poetry competition, the Maryborough Golden Wattle Festival poetry competition and the Melbourne Shakespeare Society’s sonnet competition. His work has al

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781760411190

Book preview

Mirror

Mirror

New & selected poems

William Cotter

Ginninderra Press

Contents

Copyright

The Mirror

Encounters

Call From the Land

Birdsong

Songs For a Beachcomber

Afterword

Mirror: New & Selected Poems

ISBN 978 1 76041 119 0

Copyright © text William Cotter 2016

Cover photo: Chris Matthews

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published in this form 2016 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015 Australia

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

The Mirror

Of Turnips and Clouds

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He was a practical man, my father

And he moved confidently through the rows,

Chipping, clearing, laying bare the brown earth,

Turning each splayed top to an island

And pausing only to straighten his back

Before enforcing order on the next row.

He was, indeed, a man of the earth

And I watched with a child’s admiration,

But then, with a child’s restlessness,

Drawn to the blue sky

And the white, sloping clouds. Shapeless, at first,

They took on, as I watched, lightness and depth,

Edges and gullies. An airy landscape

I was sure had been fashioned just for me.

Disconcerted, I looked down and across.

But my father was almost out of sight

And the clouds, now dazzlingly persistent,

Would not release me.

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Yes. He was a practical man, my father.

A man of the earth. And I sense, even

A life time later, a purpose missing

From my life. But he is gone. Long gone now

And I am held, still, by those sloping clouds

And floating landscapes I viewed as a child.

My Uncle’s Home

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Apprehensive, I peer through the windscreen

And the withering years stare back.

Still the bluestone walls conniving with the hill,

The box-thorn hedge, tangled as ever.

But, now, a fence curbs all excesses.

The cottage, smaller than I remember,

Sports outward-looking paths,

Manicured gardens on watch.

From such order there must be no retreat,

Yet, when the stars creep out unobserved

And tumble briefly in torrents of rebellion,

Does a fox still yelp by the cemetery?

And does a child creep to a window,

Clutching excitement and fear

More precious than reason,

Rummaging through reefs of trees

For the glimpse of a tail, eyes coppered by the moon

And a ghost crossing the track?

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Out on the bay a cargo vessel,

Blunt as an old pencil,

Ploughs the passage forged between blocks of stone,

A work horse tamed, yet greedy for the open sea.

Smoke spills its way south,

Ink from a careless calligrapher’s pen.

Heaped on the concrete shoreline,

Wood chips rain thick as krill.

Bulldozers purr, gantries, cables

Gleam in a spidery dawn.

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But somewhere, perhaps, warming itself

By a mossy, circular tank,

A tiger snake loops round the sun

And a fox, sharp-eyed and patient,

Waits for the dusk.

Memories of a Wimmera Childhood

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I recall the anaesthetising heat.

The browning fence posts and the rusting wire.

The brassy spikes of stubble. The thin bleat

Of ewes. The false creeks spiralling higher

In the plate glass sky. The ploughed, tumbled soil

A child might scuff his way through. Flat pebbles

Skimmed over water. Tractor smoke in coils,

Spun out or falling in blue-grey dribbles

And winter clouds plastering horizons.

Long pointed lightnings. Rain hammering sheds,

Red corrosive mud. Grumbling truck engines.

Bogged utes and swearing farmers scratching heads

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The tenuously peeping lines of wheat

And the sun, fuelled again with summer heat.

The Small Boy and the ’Roo Shoot

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It was the sudden light that betrayed you,

That long white needle

Shot out between the back shed and the cow paddock

And pinning you there in the tussocks.

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The filtered shadows of night you knew,

The whisper of fox breath,

The distant, cut short squeal of a rabbit

And the moon splaying out

Between the branches of the dead wattles.

Night was your friend.

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But not this switched on fire,

This avalanche of frost

Coming dead straight towards you.

They were things you were not programmed for.

The centuries had not