Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2024.
Go Fish, poems by Linda Adair.
Go fish
for ideas
beneath waves
of consciousness
try to hook the line
enter the indigo depths
of the unconscious to
breach
in dreams as images flash
silver arabesques of feeling
from another place
and a time yet to be
the spawn are slippery
and hard to catch.
‘Meeting’ you at 4 am
Clocks have
no meaning for you now
your wrist is bare
you no longer carry a phone
At the train station
as old friends we embrace
begin to say goodbye
but you tarry
I laugh at this
discharge emotion —
you have all the time
not in this world
You announce
Lynda with a Y just spent
half an hour with you
Details please!
then a knitting nanna sits down
dressed like a pint-sized Anna Wintour
in unison you both say
why do you want to know?
Dumbstruck I do not explain
merely gaze at you
more 26 than 62
the self you could have become
always that mop of brown curls
big green eyes
spry thin ready
to ramble or climb
the steep cliffs of your ambition
unbidden you recall the line
sea and breeze and night and water
and I respond with the next
and two scampering raggamuffins
my words for us inscribed in silver
on that long-since-lost
Georg Jensen cuff
to claim my heart before I left for Canada
no matter
you intended to plough
furrows of wordly success
even on that first train trip
amid a train strike
As the train enters the underground
you bemoan your sister’s distance
she never takes my call anymore
and isn’t on social media much
I have just been in touch with her
as we have friends in common
and I mention we caught up at a recent funeral.
But I don’t tell you
it was yours.
© Linda Adair
A poet, artist, as well as publisher of Rochford Press/co-editor of Rochford Street Review, Adair grew up on Darug country without knowing whose land she stood on. She now lives on Darug and Gundungarra lands in the Blue Mountains, Australia, and pays her respect to the Traditional Custodians of Country which always was, and always will, be Aboriginal. Her debut book The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, P76 the Sonic Poetry Festival Issue, Ozburp, To End All Wars, Messages from The Embers, Poetry for the Planet, Pure Slush Volume 25 and Work! Lifespan Vol 5 as well as various journals. During a recent Varuna residency, she began working on a verse memoir of her family’s complex relationship to unceded land. She has been a featured poet at various venues including La Mama Poetica and a Sonic Poetry Festival event. And has been interviewed for 3CR Spoken Word and is reading at the World Poetry Day event in Sydney on 21 March.