At Beauty's Pawnshop

By John O’Dell

Born in Sydney, Australia, the son of an American sailor and an Australian school teacher, I was raised and educated in the United States, my childhood spent on a small farm in the Midwest and my adolescence in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I worked in the Post Office in San Francisco for five years and then taught French and English in a small country town in New South Wales, Australia, during the seventies. The character of its people, the austere beauty and the sense of space of this continent left a deep impression upon me and can be seen in my poems.

I began experimenting with poetry in the early eighties, and this became a genuine passion in l984 when I was selected as one of fifteen Washington, D.C. area poets for the Jenny McKean Moore Poetry Workshop at The George Washington University taught by Julia Alvarez. My short stories have appeared inContempa, an Australian literary review, and my poetry in a number of U.S. reviews including Visions, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The George Mason Review, The Atlanta Review and others.

My work appears in two anthologies: Hungry As We Are, (Washington Writers Publishing House, l995) and Free State : A Harvest of Maryland Poets (A Scop Publications anthology, l989).

My first collection of poems, Painting at Night was published in 1994.

I was a French and English teacher in Prince Georges County and now live in Annapolis, Maryland. I am a member of the Washington Writers Center and have participated in readings and writing workshops there and at various locations throughout the Washington-Baltimore area.

My other passions are travel, dogs, and jazz, all of which enrich my poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479771110

Book preview

The Flash Mob

Little stands but the high, sandstone walls

of correction. Daisies, timid and sparse,

poke up today in Tasmanian spring

through the cracks of the old factory floor.

Here, women and their children carded

wool through years of twelve-hour days

before dying of exhaustion, hunger,

withering grief beneath transported sun.

Listen to the raging songs of the women

in solitary, and in this season’s pale light

imagine the flash mob lifting their skirts

and slapping their bottoms to show

contempt for the chaplain who, atop

hypocrisy’s towering, hands high mount,

had ridden out once again to admonish

these wicked to turn toward repentance.

Although Sydney ordered one of his men

to unbutton breeches on an Australian beach

so gathered aborigines would know he’d

brought humans with him, not ghosts

from the Dream Time, these solitary songs,

defiant bums drumming, speak more clearly

of our kind than flaccid phallus on command,

or crumbling jail stone in spring sunshine.

They Always Wore Hats

They always wore hats, the men

of my grandfather’s generation,

or, so say the four photos of him

that survive, cracked fifty year old

black and whites. Charles Miller,

fleeing the Prussian soldier that

Bismarck would make of him, landed

in Sydney Harbour, looking backward,

like most others, reassured, yet

troubled by the empty ocean at his back.

He had an impulse toward husbandry.

In these photos he holds wrigglers–

a cat, a child, a barefoot squirmer,

a thumb sucker. The earliest is

taken in the bush, his huge hands

on hips standing before a starving cow,

a saddled horse in a half cleared

paddock, the horse all but faded

from the photo, now, as the droughts

would later airbrush them all from the

landscape of gum tree and burned grass.

Coal made him wealthy in the city,

and, after his wife died in the thirties,

he sailed the world. In China, he saw

a man executed, beheaded, I’m told, but

not why he stood in the crowded street

watching, or if it was good schooling

for his own leaving, a sudden heart

attack in a busy Sydney street, life

severed as cleanly as the keen

morning light by the brim of his hat.

Truth and Trawling

Dropout farm boy, American sailor,

when my father came to Sydney

in the late twenties he fell in love.

Plain, city bred, Irish-German, she took

him trawling one night at Dee Why.

In the darkness, he spoke of marriage.

Truth and sailors, her draft-dodging

Prussian father began, and she listened,

smiling at the thought of their surprise

when, very soon, Miss would be Mrs.

On their honeymoon, she tried golf

in a narrow skirt, eyed his camera

like a time bomb, knowing the spell

would explode, he’d see her, then,

her fumbling duckling self. Next week,

next month, if chance were on her side,

he’d hold her up to the light, careful

with his fingers not to smudge their bliss

and shake his head in disbelief, as he

had when his shot sliced wide into sand.

Then he’d hear the rattle of an anchor

chain pulled, and dream of beautiful

harbors where no woman knew his name.

She’d learn to wait, and then not wait

anymore. She waited, studying him,

his empty duffel in their bedroom closet.

He put the photos in an album and put

their honeymoon away. She learned what

waiting meant, his snores rattling beside her.

She soon dreamed her own strange harbors.

Your Bow Toward Night

…. and turning our stern toward morning, our bow

toward night, we bore southwest out of the world of man*

He’d not be penned by your exploits; when

the boy became a man, he needed room.

What arrows could he notch with you around?

The island was small, you learned, after all.

And she? What could she do but choke

back the rage and welcome you back?

But, because of those years of lying alone,

her bed seemed