Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2026
The heart’s resistance, poems by Jane Williams.
The heart’s resistance
When I look back on that time, a cruel rite of passage
for which there could be no reckoning, you are all belly
and precipice and future self. O the round robin song of you.
I wish I had stayed. Even if there was nothing my staying
could have changed. There are still days I wish it
with all the hopelessness of unrequited love.
The West Coast of Ireland promised a hardiness
we fell for though the waiting wore us to blurs
of our former selves until we must have resembled
well-thumbed worry dolls. And then, because the window
had closed and because my other life called and called
I left and you were sisterless.
At the train station a smile almost reaching your true blue eyes
as you pushed a copy of Anam Cara into my hands
like forgiveness. I read it all the way home on trains
and planes, in waiting rooms and up and down escalators.
Hanging everything on the good omen I willed your inscription
to be – with gratitude and love from the three of you.
It would be grand, why wouldn’t it be when all was pronounced
primed and ready and any day now. Any day.
Later, when the remembrance photo arrived, there he was
wholly formed and wholly emptied, my nephew who was not.
The small shock of it lodged in my sternum like bullet fragments
deemed harmless enough to leave in
not accounting for the mind’s capacity to churn.
The heart’s resistance to the will of any god.
The endless run of sorrow through veins.
And for a time, the unbearable sight of lipstick in any shade of blue.
Permission to sing
The driver reels off a list of banned behaviours:
The smoking of cigarettes and consumption of alcohol.
Hot food and beverages.
High volume conversations on or off the phone.
Keep it G rated he seems to be suggesting. As for
music, plug your headphones in and for the sake
of all aboard (if not all that is holy) sing along
in your head only. And this last one is going to be
a problem for the man up front whose body
barely fleshed pulses nonetheless like transfusion.
Whose inner muse refuses to shut down.
Who moments ago was chanting
in the waiting room then curbside and now on the bus
all hum and twitch asking for exception, for permission
to express who he is among us.
How can we not feel sorry, those of us who have known
even the smallest measure of inhibition. Who can scream
on the inside for just so long before the skin begins
its inevitable peel. No matter how deft our hands
at the invisible harp. How well-timed the beat
of our bobbing heads, blinking eyes.
Soon enough the inoffensive toe-tapping becomes
a knee-jerk, hipsway, filling the chest cavity, thumping
in the throat each unsung moment, until finally released
in some universal but unteachable language
of the undeniable self. Every bit as catchy and crucial
as the wheels on the bus.
Care package
At first, I’m thinking The Sound of Music
and Julie Andrews singing down a storm
with a few of her favourite things
but then I remember Austrian fathers
and incoherent love the world over –
how the first step out of fear and into mercy
is letting go and what a tall order that can be.
So, comfort food it is:
cinnamon doughnuts for everyday scrapes
profiteroles for deeper disappointments.
The safety net of someone else’s memoir
to fall through.
The masseuse of your choice on tap
five lucky bingo chips
and a murder mystery-solving jigsaw puzzle
to rein in chaos theory and ignite the illusion
of control if only for a little while.
Also, a travel guide to Sicily – the beginning
and the end of nostalgia di casa.
Finally, one of those shadow boxes
(in case of emergency break glass)
for your eyes only so don’t ask me
what wonders it might contain.
A good boy
I say I’m not a dog person over and over until
I remember how my brother never seemed without one.
Never seemed quite grounded without one.
Uncollared, their sex left whole.
Only ever restrained by the beat of his voice.
They had travelling names like Gypsy and Storm
and he had big plans for the journey
the last would accompany him on
padding loyally alongside horse and rider
in and out of Clint Eastwood sunsets.
And then he died. The brother, not the dog.
And none of us were in a position to take on
a high maintenance pet whose head
had been filled with such daredevil dreams.
It was of course doubly our loss. That’s the way of it.
An ad placed in a paper and an elderly woman
made to order, grieving her own shepherd.
I’ve wondered over the years
how much of the man she found in the dog:
Scent of Tiger Balm and medicinal weed.
The itch to chase a ball and the animal
from which it was fashioned.
To be told again and again by the leader of the pack
good boy, there’s a good good boy…
Homes I have known
Where visitors are asked to wipe their feet
before and after entering
and the surface of everything is clean enough
to eat off (though you wouldn’t dare)
and every hair, every smile, quivers in its place.
Where there is no time
and all the time in the world to talk
and laughter can arise even from grief’s exhaustion
and names are called in from the cold or the dark
because they are so longed for.
Where mothers and children
move like cat burglars weaving through webs
of laser beams, imagining some prize (surely)
for years of second-guessing. For diffusing fear
with risky laughter and vivid make-believe
in the forests and oceans of their desire.
Where a spare bed is made and turned down,
the right book and some wild flowers placed within reach.
The kitchen grimy with love
and the couch blanketed in companionable dogginess
and you are welcome, whoever you are.
© Jane Williams
Jane Williams lives in Lutruwita/Tasmania and is currently working on her tenth book of poems. https://janecwilliams.com/