Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
The Heart of Stars, poem by Sarah Tiffen.
The Heart of Stars
“If we have no peace, we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
– Mother Theresa, Calcutta
The day I saw Professor Brian Cox on a reel
where he talked about being asked to make a video message
for the leaders of the world to play
at the opening of the Glasgow Climate Summit – and he said
that, instead of a video saying ‘Welcome to Glasgow’,
he made a video where he made an important argument as quickly as he could
to be discussed by the leaders of the world at that summit, being:
‘that it is possible that this is the only place where complex biology has emerged
in our galaxy and if that’s true then this is
the only island of meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns
and you are responsible for it, because you are the world’s leaders –
therefore, if you destroy it either through deliberate action or inaction
then each of you are personally responsible for destroying meaning
in a galaxy of 400 billion suns potentially forever.
Go away and discuss.’
was also the day that I heard from my daughter
that she saw a tiktok of an obstetrician in a burned out bombed out
hospital in Gaza cutting open the bodies of dead mothers
to rescue the babies who were very soon to be born before
their young dark-eyed mothers were killed by bullets and bombs
and on the bed beside the doctor were ten tiny little babies
swaddled and peeping and shocked from having been
ripped from the wombs of their heavily pregnant dead mothers
by a weeping, bleeding doctor in a burnt out bombed out birthing room
in the desperate hope that she could give them life amidst the carnage
of dead women’s bodies, amidst the wreckage of a hospital
the bombing of which was a war crime and unforgiveable
and my daughter, herself a new doctor, wept as she told me,
and I was so grateful for the profound gift of her and her love
and it was also the day that I was gifted Bertolt Brecht’s poetry by Can Dundar –
a Turkish journalist living in exile in Berlin, who was interviewed on the radio
and who wrote an article about Ekrem Imamoglu, the jailed
Mayor of Istanbul, invoking the words of the great German poet and playwright at
the conclusion of his essay:
‘All of us or none’.
All of us, or none.
It was such a thought to chew on as I drove the winding roads from the west,
avoiding kangaroos and sheep,
and it moved me to search for Brecht’s poetry and I found a man who was
himself in exile most of his life, fleeing the Nazis in his own Germany,
then fleeing McCarthyism in his adopted America, with a voice so
familiar and wise and kind I wished to invite him for beers and yarns,
and discovered so many magic words, like:
‘What is done, is done. The water
that you poured into the wine can not
be poured out again, but everything
changes. You can begin
anew with your very last breath.’
And I was so grateful to find poet kin
in this unexpected way, and thought about
how truly mad it was that anyone would try to kill or jail such a mind,
a mind unable to submit to fascism and gently incredulous
that anyone would fall for such a thuggish, nasty, small-dicked,
ill-begotten and shameful ruse as that.
And it was also the day that I listened to Khaled Sabsabi
speaking about being an artist denounced and repudiated by politics,
and how a murderous thug regime in Israel had led to him being
labelled a terrorist in Parliament in Canberra by culture war idiots
leveraging suffering to promote their own right-wing shallow thug views
thus censoring the artist’s right to satire, ironically and not, given
the conservative appropriation of free speech as a weapon of prejudice,
ironic and tragic as Sabsabi is a Lebanese Christian – a Maronite – a sect
as gracious and ancient as the Druz – but they censored him because
he has a Middle Eastern name and twenty years ago created art critiquing
Islam and urging the true sacred of our shared humanity, regardless of our faith –
as faith is faith in the sacred no matter what the shape and sound,
and how he – the artist – had chosen to be silent in the face of his defamation
in deference to the great Maronite saint St Charbel,
whose shrine he had visited on his first trip home to Lebanon from Western Sydney
since fleeing war with his family in 1977, and following the teachings in the words of the saint:
‘If you don’t understand my silence, you will not understand my words’,
which is of course imbued with great humility and dignity, though Brecht wrote once,
as the Nazis took hold of his beloved country and catastrophic war was imminent:
‘I always thought that the simplest words
would suffice. If I told things the way they were
it would rend the heart of anyone.
That you will go under if you don’t defend yourself,
should be utterly clear to you.’
That you will go under if you don’t defend yourself
should be utterly clear to you.
Though the dignity of silence in grief is noble,
like the great Indigenous Antipodean intellectuals and spiritual leaders
Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Tom Calma and Megan Davidson –
who entered into the Holy Silence of Grief after the
terrible and inexplicable repudiation of The Voice,
the violence of that abstruse denial, of that invitation
which was only to acknowledge presence in grace,
which was a simple and gentle request to hear the
First Belonging, and enshrine that First Belonging
as a right to be heard and embraced so one
small colonial outcrop could build a deeper, closer,
richer belonging to each other and the Earth, the Sea and Sky.
Dignified in Silence – the cultural mourning –
though of course the Silence elongated until the thugs shamefacedly,
defensively and smugly thought they had managed
to eradicate what cannot be eradicated – which is objective linear time,
and the Fact of 60,000 versus 250 – and the pictures in
the galleries of the Pilbara’s Murujuga, amongst the gorgeous
megafauna art, that tell the story of how
the ancients saw tall ships arrive, and strange white ghost
people emerge from amongst the sails and smoke.
Which is only to say that 260 nations of people were thriving here
before the English landed – because they saw them land.
Sometimes silence means there are no words left.
The children of Gaza are mute. They cannot speak.
But still after all that, I couldn’t help notice the sky was a blue cloth
stitched and embroidered with white cloud flutes and feathers –
and that a magpie had stood in a patch of light and sung his own kind of tune,
lilting in descending minor keys,
and that the paddocks were dark mahogany and amber coloured,
rich with the mystery of minerals that sustain life, and
the light at the end of the day was golden, golden, golden,
and I could not help but revel in it, it’s sheer miraculous beauty,
and then slept fitfully
after reading Olga Torkaczuk – her words like woodwork and tunnels and forests, a
song that was laid in my blood centuries ago. Dark labyrinths of burgundy,
intricate, gruff, galactic, a hungry spirit world.
**
Last night I read that Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of Artificial Intelligence,
holds grave fears for the world and humanity in the face of unfettered AI, and that we should
urgently and carefully install great scaffoldings of protection and limitation
to the rapidly obscenely multiplying virus of this technology of deceit,
this technology of debasing and violating authenticity and language,
appropriating our minds, our heart, our inexplicable capacity for melding
words, love, philosophy and sex into beautiful things, the yawping cry of
the human heart into the magnificent wilderness of mountains and rivers
and trees. And I tried to find a program that would remove AI from my life,
from my laptop and emails and research and writing and making of documents
and texting my children with private dialects of thoughts and love –
and I haven’t worked it out yet,
and despair and think – doesn’t anyone remember Terminator 2? Doesn’t anyone
remember Sarah Connor and her desperation, and how Sky Net burned
the children while her carcass screamed hanging from that fence around the playground?
Since the proliferation of ‘smart’ phones, the mental health of our young
has plummeted – universally anxious, universally depressed –
while we argued about energy and habitat and whether someone
made of botox was fucking someone made of steroids –
and then I might conclude that we are fickle and selfish
and cruel and violent and careless and beyond redemption.
That God abandoned us a long, long time ago, because we
don’t deserve either peace or one another or this world…
But after all this, when I smell cloves I can feel the memory-feeling
of standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, and the sound of apples
being peeled, and the light through the claret ash at the front of the house
and my grandfather coming home from the farm and lying on the floor
in his corduroy and flannelette, the scent of grease and hay.
The scent of my newborn daughter, cinnamon and custard
just before I bled out. The exquisite sense of a dewy morning
on the farm, a cello’s low and gracious mourning.
As Mary Oliver so quietly and pragmatically observed:
‘it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world’.
I deeply and wholeheartedly believe.
**
Then on the day that a young husband hung himself in
the garage of the family home while his little children were at school,
and Iris turned 100 years old, and Lent began,
and rain was promised and the television was unbearable
and the Presbyterians said they didn’t feel comfortable
to hire their church hall to people of a different God, who were
the Muslim community of Afghans and Indonesians and Syrians and Malaysians
who wished to gather to hold their iftar happy feast with friends and family,
and to which everyone was invited to join in,
I heard Esther Freud, daughter of painter Lucian Freud
and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud – and whose family luckily
escaped Nazi Germany to England when her father was a boy –
talking about a story about homes for unwed mothers in Ireland in the 1960’s
where people sent their daughters, and where orphans and lost girls went
to be cared for by the nuns and priests, and where all the girls were sinners
and they were forced by the nuns to labour alone, and their babies were taken
from them and some of the babies were the children of priests and later
they found in the gardens of homes for girls mass graves filled with the
bodies of 1000’s of little babies born in sin and unconsecrated – and the
streets filled with women with broken hearts for the babies that were taken
and that luckily, Esther’s mother was independent and fierce and had Lucian,
and kept her babies close and went on adventures to Morocco instead of
having to hand her babies to nuns in the dark.
And I wondered about our capacity for suffering
and inflicting suffering on others
and how Christ suffered for us but did not
I think intend for us to make others suffer for us
to invoke Christ’s suffering,
as we are not Christ but only human and
we belong to the sacred and we need each other
and it’s ‘all or none’ and we ought to, must, tread carefully
and prayerfully upon the earth.
And on the day I drove once more to the west, in a cloud
of halcyon light, with the ghosts of ancestors thronging
and the whispering country shining and my heart a prism
of love and sadness, I thought of philosophy,
and the cosmologist’s words on the only question worth asking, which is:
What does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe?
‘And the answer is so paradoxical that whilst we are definitely physically insignificant – the Earth is one planet circling around one star amongst 400 billion stars in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies in a small patch of the Universe, so we are definitely small, just specs of dust
But if we think about what we are – collections of atoms, and some of them are as old as time, our bodies made in stars cooked over billions of years in a pattern that can think – you have the means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us.
And it sounds unlikely when you put it like that – you take a few things, cooked in the heart of stars, stick them together and suddenly they have ideas and they form structures that can think and feel, and stars start writing music! How does that happen?
And then you ask, are there other worlds where this has happened – and the answer is no, or we must work from that premise – so this is the only place where anything thinks for millions of light years in every direction.
And if you consider the sheer miracle that this planet is the only place where anything thinks – then suddenly you end up considering this planet the most valuable place in the universe.’
And I remember a chilly evening in June
when my youngest son and I had taken our dog for a walk on the commons
on dusk when the quiet was soothing and the bitter winter breeze a tonic
and the water black marble with swirls of streetlights and moonglow
and the bush clumped silhouettes like gatherings of rangy dark monsters
and on the last turn, my son saw a shape on the ground ahead,
lying as if flung by a small bottlebrush tree in the dark,
and as we approached we saw it was the body of a man
alone and unmoving in the freezing mid-winter dark,
and my son bent down close by and heard that he was breathing,
and asked ‘are you ok, mate?’ and got a slight moan in response,
and we conferred and called the ambulance
and waited there to guide them in to the
lone lonely man prone on the cold grass in the freezing mid-winter dark
of that bitter late evening in June.
For to sleep in the open in winter in this austere and Godless city,
unconscious and unremarked, would surely lead to death
and though we had our own worries, and were unknown to him
and he to us, the fact that our paths had crossed in the dark
on that night meant we
were bound by ties of cosmic reasoning,
each cooked in the heart of stars a million years ago
and that we must show compassion, and wait on hold
on Triple Zero, and wait until the ambulance arrived
and hand him to the medics to be saved. For to do nothing
would be to look away from our shared belonging,
and that one day we too may be lying in the dark
alone and frozen and hope for others to do unto us
the same. Or if not, that we ourselves could at least walk forward
with the sense of purpose and moral fortitude
that comes with doing what is right out of love
for your fellow man, or creature,
and if only we were not so afraid at the thought
of being alone and sacred in the universe
that we are consumed with self-hatred
and must pursue divisions in order to
define ourselves as other, not one,
and to tell ourselves our battles are mythic
and meaningful so the fight itself deflects
from our own inevitable reconstitution
back into the stars after a short, fragile,
miraculous, and sacred life.
And we could live quietly and in grace
amidst the light and water and the birds and dragonflies
and consider seriously the miracle of Life,
of trees, of poetry and music and love
and practice rituals of communion
that affirm we belong to one another
and pray to all gods together
and never bomb hospitals or kill children
or eradicate peoples or think that any one of us
is entitled to any more than any other
and listen carefully to the Universe breathing peace
and breathe it back.
© Sarah Tiffen
Sarah Tiffen is a poet, publisher, speechwriter and teacher. She is Leeton born and bred, and founded Riverina Writing House in 2021 to allow the voices of rural people to be heard and to make unique books and promote writing, stories and literature at home and abroad. She is forever grateful to her own publisher Ginninderra Press and Stephen Matthews for giving her the chance to be a ‘real’ poet with her own books, and wants to give this transformative opportunity to others. In a world of turmoil, authentic, beautiful, grassroots, literary objects made with love, telling stories of truth, is an act of defiance, rebellion and a crusade to uphold values that make us human, fragile, faulty and real. Her sixth book of poetry – Redemption Road: new and early works – is out soon. She is mother of three amazing children – Tom, Lil and Wilbur – and loves swimming, poetry, her dog Alfred Maximus, drinking whiskey and talking by the fire, and walking in wild places