David Adès – To All My Forgotten Selves

Ades LE P&W 5 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024

To All My Forgotten Selves, poems by David Adès.


To All My Forgotten Selves

For Michele Ramshur

Of course I don’t remember you,
scattered as you are all over the world

where I left you, across more years
than I care to remember,

held in the recollections of others,
in hundreds of letters and photo albums —

yet the knowledge of your existence,
the disappearing contrails of your passage,

luminous, fragmented, partial,
delights me even so,

and when some small fragment of you emerges,
unexpectedly, a gift released from the past,

as when an old friend, (first met
in Istanbul in 1984, and seen again

only a few times in the ensuing years
in locations between Athens and New York)

messages me to say that she has found,
written in a little book given to her

in her twenties by a friend,
a note that read

Complaineth not of what thou chooseth:
Davidicus Adictus (Roman anti-whingemongerer)

(as seen through the eyes of DAVID ADES)
that made her giggle, I too

laugh at this unremembered self,
at its humour and nature,

grateful at its re-emergence,
at the joy it carries, that we share.


I Threw a Stone

I was not the first and will not be the last
to throw a stone.

I hefted the weight of it in my hand
before the explosion of violence

through my shoulder and arm.
I did not throw the stone in anger.

It did not split a forehead
or exact a tithe of blood.

I took from the stone, its inertia,
and gave it flight.

I relieved it momentarily of weight
and gave it lightness.

In turn, it gave me a skim
across waves, one, two, three,

four, five times before it sank.
This was our transaction

like so many others before it,
my moment in the secret life of a stone.


I Should Have Said

Lately, as things draw towards a close,
I feel as if I should have said something,

something that remains unsaid
amongst the vast flock of words

that have flapped and flown from my mouth,
envoys to hearts and minds

and many lost to the unhearing air.
There are so many truths

I have not found, so many questions
without answers. But it is not that.

I haven’t lived my life
to lose it taking a stand.

It is not that either.
Courage either arrives or doesn’t

when it is needed. So I imagine:
I wouldn’t know.

Perhaps that’s it: perhaps
I cannot speak what I don’t know.

Still, I feel I should have said something,
that it might have lit a fuse,

been a blessing, healed something broken,
that it might have made a difference.


© David Adès

David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal.  His next collection, The Heart’s Lush Gardens, is forthcoming from Flying Island Books. David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMBjlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

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