Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Iron harvest, poems by Louise Wakeling.
Iron harvest
armed drones are the accepted
weaponry point of the realm,
the new normal. cluster bombs
pelt steel rain, bomblets air-dropped
or ground-launched –
a 40 % dud rate obvious
in the field. undetonated,
mother-bombs sprout landmines
damage immediate
and for years to come
grenades lined with phosgene
deadly tubers unearthed in potato-fields
loitering munitions cradled
like ruined infants are ferried
from the site in tiny stretchers
farmers ploughing their fields
are routed by a deadly hail,
children stumble on half-buried
ordnance, broken-winged missiles
cued for maximum damage
speech gone, a shell-shocked child
in the hospital ward holds up
shaking hands, bewildered, trembling
like an olive tree in winter
Before the inspection
sure, relocate, move to the coast –
but will you throw words like clay
on a wheel the way you can here,
thin mist rising from the highlands,
wind groaning in the branches
whispered syllables of rain
threaded through dawn?
still more could be committed
to paper or screen, arrows straining
at a distant target. more to the point,
will they find their mark?
how to leave, when you’re hoarding
words on paper like clocks
divorced from time – severance poems
from lovers, manuscripts muted
in drawers, marinading in dust
with faded photos of people
whose names you scarcely recall.
marooned in folders, are they waiting
to be rescued, or do they know
in their bones they’re yellow bin-bound,
drabs of poems cosying up
to faded atm receipts, grades
of former students and other
flotsam of a life well-lived –
well, lived. rifling through them,
you imagine a conflagration,
a letting-go of worldly things.
all very Dao. to shred or not to shred?
or, opting out, will you re-inter
these remains under “something
precious that must be saved”?
for now, all’s neat
for the inspection, a thin patina
of order tarpaulined over rooms.
you fling open the study door
with a warning: “Don’t
look in here”, and the agent,
poking his head in, exclaims,
“Oh, yes, the smell of old paper …”
when children wither in a manufactured famine,
and watchers wring their hands and say nothing,
tongues silenced in fear in mute outrage
or worse smooth voices invoke collateral damage
righteous death all normalised in war
nothing to see here though blood spills
from a young girl’s mouth and far and wide
there is only rubble and refuse and folded earth
where no flowers grow
when the bodies of children are cries
punctuated with shrapnel, indecipherable,
made monstrous, words that might
have been uttered because we are human,
because they are human, drift
like official leaflets from above
to sink in smoky air unread
© Louise Wakeling
Louise Wakeling was born not far from Botany Bay at Arncliffe in Sydney. Though she would like nothing better than to sojourn in the south of France, she feels she has come home since she moved to Dharug/Gundungurra country in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Her poetry has been published online in journals such as Burrow and in the print or online anthologies The Best Australian Poems, Antipodes, Guide to Sydney Rivers, Live Encounters, Cordite, Contemporary Poetry, Caring for Country, Wild Voices: An anthology on wildlife, Messages from the Embers, an Australian Bushfire anthology, Guide to Sydney Crime, and The Best Australian Science Writing. A part-time English teacher/mentor via Zoom, she is currently working on a fifth collection of poetry, and a novel set in London and Sydney which explores coercive control and trauma and survival in the lives of three women between WW1 and the early 1970s. Off Limits (Puncher & Wattmann, 2021) is her fourth collection of poetry, ranging across ecopoetics, sewer-surfing and the tragi-comedy of relationships.