Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Judy, poems by Justin Lowe.
Judy
on the 24th anniversary of my mother’s passing
my mother lives in her letters,
and in the five of her paintings
that hang proud on my thinning walls.
those Spanish lanes
narrowing to a point
where she finally wandered off down the dark stairs to the water.
twenty-four years since her mask stopped fogging,
and yet those Spanish lanes keep narrowing,
down to where this whistling wind was born.
The Rapture
the house next door is on the market.
this should be no real business of mine,
or of the pair of turtle doves
the realtor spooked off with a wooden owl
the same day she threatened to call the cops on Dave
for harmlessly chasing his voices up and down the street.
my old neighbour was a kind but lazy man.
lived alone.
polite, unassuming, funny,
his one Achilles heel being his aversion to dogs.
for twenty years he watched his house
fall down around him with a gentle shrug.
he sold it to a cult, unwittingly,
and I haven’t had the heart to write him
and tell him of their wall-eyed women
donning their scarves so God will recognise them
on the day of Rapture.
my Mozart offends them, my Dizzy Gillespie.
their coarse manners, in equal measure, offend me.
I imagine this is what they believe keeps the world turning,
like magnets pushing against each other,
their earth-movers and angle-grinders
rending the peace of this quiet street at the crack of dawn.
we are the defiled, you see, and merit no consideration.
Christ Jesus, please come wipe their milksop grins from their faces.
Lord of Justice, please save me from your followers.
Orbit
there has been trouble on earth.
the angels have descended.
they sewed a breach in the outer hull
with their flaming wings.
we watched them from the portholes
as they punched holes in the ozone
speeding towards the burning cities
the huge smoke plumes like algae on a pond.
our first glimpse of an angel
was a glitch in the sensors,
the shape of a crow’s beak on the array
a composite of green lights and red lights
creatures beyond time
searching for Chagall’s lovers and a floating violin.
such creatures have no concept of binary
of the difference between start and stop,
or of allegory,
of tragedy and farce.
they pressed their foaming mouths to the glass,
their dead eyes filled with a righteous anger
at our floating presence high above the burning cities,
the dark ripples of Lethe, the mute cries of Absalom.
© Justin Lowe
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His ninth collection, “San Luis”, is due out through Puncher & Wattmann in October 2024.