Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Elysium Fields, poems by Sarah Tiffen.
Elysium Fields
Gone, gone in the beautiful barley-gold days
where the sunlight sprang from the Earth
and rained like a fountain of Godsent Light –
golden-white and burnished in the
Blushing Elysium Fields where the remnant harvest lies levensduur levenswijze
the eons of white-gold stubble turning away and away
quickly to sudden dips and lows
and the Anodised Road becoming
a river of Molten Light, quickens by and lowly,
Bright pagentry exaltory, vastly pregnant and plangent beyond
High Mountainous Light, o gorgeous days of
the praising passing joy – when I left my son on his
birthday and rode a chariot of viscous memory
over the Turning Bridge on high on the swept bend.
Past the Great Granite View, past the Great Hedge –
masterly gothic cactus scrawling in monster dancing
down the Railway Line, down the cloistered culvert –
Swept away – gulping miles of golden syrup liquid-y suspended
in saps and sliding – old gum oozes, thick amber glass knots caught me
suspended –
swathes of cherry orchards anointed
with rich autumn ordered Baroque Eloquencies
of scene, swing down to the stone castles and
vasty wandering hills and how I felt each Past
Moment and it led me, fastly held and broken down
to that moment of dear heart longing
that moment of releasing for my
Beautiful Child, how I let go, at Sherlock’s Corner,
at Alice Lemon Bridge, old Salt Gully and its strange
uncertain wanderings where I am lost, lost, lost
for words – knocked down by a vast army Wunderlitz
Austerlitz
schottische distel
of Scotch Thistle posies, stark anarchic beauty,
carved woody stoops and thistle forest sweeping the falling hill,
grey fossilised bouquets marching from Scotland
across blood leached miles, the soft fur of grasses
O down the Valorous Days – that
Heavy Cataclysm, catalysts of dust motes
catacombed in air trysts and treasures raining and chorusing in
millions, a Godly slat of gold from the mutinous Sky –
onward…I leave, leave, fall and leave my heart and return,
calling and longing for divine oblivion
And the Black Rock Hill, and downed shields of light
like spilled sauternes,
o landscape of barsac, bommes, fargues and preignac,
sweeping past like a swipe of gold embroidered world –
brimming old dams expunging burnished mercurial,
as though great hands carelessly tore the flesh of the hill
wide pulling back the gold fringed skin like a purse like a gouge
to show a mounded wound of Light beneath within
bulging from the grasses mollusc-esque fronding – dams awash with
stray and holy light, O Gone, Gone in the year of my dark fortunes, past the
broken homesteads, the mighty hidden lanes, and
grand disquisitions of deep-freighted solemn and somnolent heart.
Stand we, mollified, disquieted and rent at moments of Redemption
as my griefs and nerves mapped out in a crawling debrided grace
upon the switching twitching Gold
of the breezeful paddocks, and voices volleying beyond the ear –
rejoin and choir, devouring me in miles, and ring out
conspicuous and transmogrifying joys and journeys, disgorge, reform, retell, and vanquish
beneath great canopies, intimate and defenestrated, unmemorised,
heart-spent and tessellated fears and longing joys, and terrible violence
and faiths and perspicacious ghosts on the thistle fields,
rustle and sacrificial kiting and falling, and rocky clusters and caps
as round the bend from the crescent of the hill, airs of
forgivenance buoyed with Divinities of Light and secret sceptres
Forgivenance
Forgive
Forgive
I ask in the name of all that has left and all we must bear –
O salient, sentient, sentinel and effusions and airs,
And as we swing round and down away and into –
Light bursts and airs and all the long days and gorgeous days
Of love and failure repeat, replete.
The keening heart expunging grief, devolutions of grief,
Exquisite follies and bear me down.
Sisyphus Rising
in honour of Dylan and Seamus
Out in the house paddock
my father is hunting nightshade.
Light floats across the green acre
like water, resounding with heat – oily,
viscous, mirages of cattle upside down
amongst the great hairy peppercorn cathedral
along the old channel bank, in
the paddock’s heart.
From the sunroom we watch him:
step, stoop, plant the nozzle –
like an ancient astronaut carting a yellow tank on his back–
compositor of his own life and oxygen (or Roundup),
out in his lunarscape of
heat and weeds and dung.
He is a figure in a landscape
wholly made by himself,
long, bare and spindly,
brown leather legs like Quinkins –
spirit, Father, in his element and Elemental.
Step. Stoop. Spray.
Each nightshade plant – with bloodpurple berries
and sturdy, dogged stalks – a pest that must be met in battle
in direct single handed combat – poison applied directly to each root.
One plant at a time.
There are hundreds. Or maybe thousands.
You can’t kill them any other way.
So you must persist – or capitulate.
The victory of the nightshade army – and your own defeat – unthinkable.
Watching, I think of Lear – bare, forked, defying Fate.
But my son, also watching – has the keener sense,
invoking Sisyphus.
The impossible task.
The interminable, dogged refusal to be owned.
The pride.
*
My father, a lone figure,
in his house paddock, hunting nightshade,
raging, stubborn beyond all measure,
against the dying of the light.
Incandescent.
Singular.
© Sarah Tiffen
Sarah Tiffen is a poet, 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. 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.