Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
My Mother’s Raincoat, poems by Jane Downing.
My Mother’s Raincoat
Today I borrowed my mother’s raincoat
from the back of the hall cupboard
The brown one, quilted
with snappy press studs
It wasn’t raining when I arrived
she hasn’t worn it for years –
she will not notice its absence
amongst the bigger absences
Like a childhood memory
blackberrying in the hills
scratches down my shins
running to find her up ahead
a handkerchief from the pocket
of this brown raincoat wiping off the blood
before it reaches my socks
but also ice-cream containers filled
with fruit, the plumpest from
furthest in amongst the brambles
deep purple bursting the skin
smearing fingers and lips
blood or juice
impossible to say
and not mattering because
we were safe under the low grey sky
with tubs brimming and mum
producing a thermos of milky tea
taste scratching the back of my throat
The blackberries became jam
the darkest shade of Torvill
and Deans’ outfits at the Olympics
the slow crescendo of Bolero
aching in the chest as he flings
her across the Sarajevo ice
A line of perfect scores
A line of jam jars labelled 1984
The lining of mum’s old coat
is the cream you get
at the centre of chocolate eclairs
pockets on the inside
speak to reversibility
I take the coat off in the rain
turn it inside out
and have a whole new coat
not the one my mother no longer recognises
from days blackberrying in the Wicklow Hills
on the other side of memory
Heavens Above
Bodies synchronise
within the crowd
Eyes closed
cued to the rhythm –
beats up through
the floorboards
the old hall shuddering
under the weight
of Saturday night
expectations
Sweat is a drug
slapped sober
by the cool air
in the queue
to the dunny down
the back
music throbbing
against the ear
drums – muffled not muted
regarding the stars
There is a Man on the Roof
There is a man on the roof while I read poetry
His footfall is a cat’s prowl on the brittle tiles
as light as a poet’s pen across paper
and not the usual possum thunder
I scan lines as the man on the roof scans
valleys and ridges (though definitions change
up there) taking a moment, I like to think,
to lift his eyes from the roof
to the horizon dressed in jacaranda hues
What else is there to do to look busy
as a tradie so obviously gets to work?
Billy Collins tells me the window is to the poet
what the oven is to the baker
the mirrors and chairs to the barber
but I must avoid my favourite pane of glass
now layered by the rungs of the ladder
belonging to the man on the roof
placing the lemon tree and the birdbath and
the wisp of cloud in the shape of a Frenchman’s hat
(I do not believe in UFOs) in different frames
It is coincidence my Monday has made me think
of Collin’s poem Monday with its workmanlike windows
It is simply the day the man on the roof has come
to give me a quote for much the same reason
I’m now dipping into Billy Collins
The real work will come later
when I pick up a pen and the man on the roof
and his squad pick up hammers and mallets
(because you have to destroy to create) plus
nail guns and sealant and wood as thick as
two short planks and as long as the western eave
and tiles fired in a kiln
each like a word spoken in anger – hard and resistant
fragile once time has worked on it
In my framed window boots appear
knees groin chest and the man on the roof is
no longer on the roof and indeed he has a quote
(Collin’s quotes can be mind-blowing
this one lifts the roof right off)
Life is about plugging leaks
and any blue sky you see above
is likely a hole where the rain can get in
To end on an optimistic note
© Jane Downing
Jane Downing’s poems have appeared at home and overseas including in Meanjin, Rabbit, Cordite, Canberra Times, Not Very Quiet, Social Alternatives, e.ratio, Last Stanza, Borderless, Best Australian Poems, and previously in Live Encounters. In 2025 she won the NSW Poetry Prize. Her collection, ‘When Figs Fly’ (Close-Up Books) was published in 2019.