War Stories: Poems for the Age of Fallibility

By Antonia Hildebrand

‘These days many individual collections of poetry (and some anthologies as well) are presented in language which all too often, offers the particular experiences of the poets as if they were clues in a cryptic crossword. If we could only put those poetic hints together (we tell ourselves) we’d be in a position to know what they were

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Nov 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781760414498

Antonia Hildebrand

Antonia Hildebrand is a poet, short story writer and essayist. She was born and educated in Toowoomba, Queensland. She married Reinhard Hildebrand in the early seventies and moved with him to Hamburg, Germany. She lived and worked in Europe for three years and also travelled in Europe and Asia before returning to Australia. She then studied at the Toowoomba Technical College, going to evening classes before gaining admission to the University of Queensland and graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1987 with a major in English literature. In 1993 she graduated Master of Letters (German) from the University of New England. Her first published short story, 'Nothing Ever Happens', appeared in Woman's Day in 1981 and Downs Images in 1982 and she has since been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies in Australia as well as Britain and the USA. Her poems have appeared in Coppertales, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poetrix, Harvester and Squidink. From 2000 to 2002 she was a member of Crime Writers Queensland and had two stories published in their books - 'The Weeping Madonna' in Menace in the Mulga and 'Second Nature' in Bad to the Bones. Her short stories have appeared in Downs Images, Woman's Day, Shortz, First Edition Magazine, Tirra Lirra and Four W Seventeen. An essay on John Howard, 'Ordinary Australians', was published in Overland in 2003. In 1998 she won the University of Southern Queensland Library Poetry Prize and in 1999 the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Marjorie Barnard Short Story Award. In 2002 she began contributing to Radio National's Bush Telegraph program. Many of her short stories have been broadcast by Queensland Storyteller on Radio 4RPH and by Words and Music on Radio 91.3 FM. Her Radio National pieces and her film reviews and essays were collected for her book The Past is Another Country: Viewpoints, Essays & Reviews published in 2003. She has also explored growing to adulthood, living in Europe and returning to Australia in the years 1951 to 1975 in her memoir Beautiful Life. In 2004 she co-wrote, with John Boshammer, Boshy and Me, a biography of his rugby legend father, Kev Boshammer. A poetry collection, The Sweet Time, was published in 2006. Other publications include The Blind Colossus, an essay collection, 2015; To Breathe and Other Stories, 2016; and War Stories, a poetry collection, 2017. She was elected president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Queensland (2015-2016).

Book preview

War Stories

War Stories

Poems for the Age of Fallibility

Antonia Hildebrand

Ginninderra Press

War Stories: Poems for the Age of Fallibility

ISBN 978 1 76041 449 8

Copyright © text Antonia Hildebrand 2017

Cover image: ragged hole in metal from bullets © Andrei Kukla

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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 2017 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Contents

War Stories

War Stories

A Prisoner in the Garden

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They couldn’t say Mandela’s name.

It was a charm,

an incantation.

When the press came to Robben Island

to see if it was really as bad

as all that,

a photographer captured Mandela

with his lens.

An angry black man

leaning on a rake, in his prisoner’s uniform

his furious eyes masked by sunglasses,

on his head

a floppy cloth hat.

So armed, he stared the camera down.

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They couldn’t write Mandela’s name.

It had power

and couldn’t be made small.

not even pressed on to paper

in fine print.

So underneath the published photo

they put the weasel words,

A prisoner in the garden.

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It’s perfect.

Almost biblical.

As if he was in Eden,

and simply couldn’t tear himself away.

Haunted

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The time will come

when you would be glad

to see her ghost

so utterly is she gone.

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Loss gives way to fear

shadows on a wall

take on a familiar shape.

An image like the after-image

on a retina

shivers there.

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But this passes too.

Then there is nothing;

just a phone number

with no one at the other end

to answer.

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Memories of a laugh,

a smile, her diamond eyes;

their exact shade of blue.

The way anger made her nose look sharp.

How empathy, in her, was almost ESP.

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Love remains

but it has no target

and no recipient.

It floats on an emptiness that feels like