Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2026
Cold, Cold Feet, poems by Robyn Rowland.
Cold, Cold Feet
February 6, 2023, an earthquake magnitude 7.6, followed by another, 6.7 after 11
minutes hit central/southern Türkiye / Northern Syria, area the size of Germany.
14 million Turks were affected. Confirmed death toll in Turkey was 53,537; in Syria around 7,000.
In Malatya city 1,393 died 6,444 were injured. 3 million in Türkiye, 2.9 million on Syria were left homeless.
Her name is Sevgi (love).
Stumbling, then tumbling out, in mimicry of river-diving
her head hits a hidden tree. Sliced open red by bark
she thinks of radishes, strangely, voice clamped by scream.
Rising from hard cold-baked earth in darkness,
snow on her skin is cold fire, burning.
Or is it flames? No. Her feet have ossified, clods of ice.
Fifteen days with no water. No heat, no light, no food.
Months under canvas are buried in her now,
except for the vividness of hunger.
But memory is quicksand, and when the tide recedes
and warm sun refreshes one year after,
bubbles of recollection rise, explode.
We are at breakfast in Alesta hotel, 1300 kilometres
from that broken place. My friend Meral creates food worth
a Sultan’s table. Her guest feeds first, simply on its display.
Bread, tomatoes, menemen, olives, cheeses with herbs,
plum chocolate cake, jars of fig, pumpkin, red poppy jam.
Bowls of apricots, walnuts. It is the usual.
The niece tries to stop her, telling me in English
she is ‘wounded’, ‘she can’t speak of it’,
yet something between us unstoppers Sevgi’s anguish.
The way she tells it is mesmerising in Turkish.
It is written on her tongue and in every feature:
eyes, cheek ridges, face, her hands reaching.
Photos of her apartment are spilt onto the table.
Sixth floor, traditional balcony, luckily made with iron.
Inside – rugs, warm comfort, family photographs.
When the earthquake split, they were sleeping, then
suddenly on a boat at sea, floor crack-crinkling.
They wavered with it in night clothes, searching for the cat,
finally, with some neighbours, escaped the building
collapsing downwards. She shows me the one thing
saved: her wedding photo. But he is not in this story.
She needs to spill, can’t stop, seeing it all again.
Middle-aged, dark, still beautiful, skin smooth
as an olive before drying, she is shaking, hand upturned.
My friend translates, part by part. ‘Write’, the woman begs,
‘Write it!’, and I do. Blue ink on a handy serviette
seems to weep into the light white paper.
Outside in the freezing dark, soil was undulating underfoot,
like water it rippled then swept. The one thing we hold to,
that the earth under our feet is solid – washed away.
Pyjamas iced up. One rug. Feet lost into the frozen tides.
In the camp, an abandoned minibus was found for sleeping.
Clothes were scavenged, wood hunted, desperation eager.
They boiled snow for water. They smelt the dead. They waited.
After four months she managed to find a bus to Çanakkale
where her daughter, grandchildren, slept in emptied school rooms.
Now renting, she waits for her crumpled home to be repaired.
To sell. If so, she will buy a single storey, outside this city,
that knows, surely, the restless earth will one day, too, waken here.
Meanwhile, she sleeps with all doors unlocked, in case.
Her cat yowls at the wind, scurries from trees shaking.
Meral’s fretful eyes sweep. Aman Tanrım! We are not ready!
Note: Aman Tanrım Oh my God
Possibilities
February 6, 2023, an earthquake magnitude 7.6, followed by another, 6.7 after
11 minutes, hit central/southern Türkiye / Northern Syria. An area the size of
Germany was impacted. 14 million Turks were affected. The confirmed death toll
in Turkey was 53,537; in Syria around 7,000. In Malatya city 1,393 died 6,444
injured.
It’s the night Malatya crumples,
like foil crushed casually before binning.
And I think of you, hoping you are in Istanbul,
not home among the apricots.
I could draw your face from memory,
earnest about the secret of the tulip.
Did you tell me after all?
Always look for the mystery you said.
Outside his shop down a small alley in Istanbul
full of artisans, we talked embroidery and carpets
with Evret; and of his son studying in Dublin –
perhaps – I have heard many carpet-sellers’ stories.
‘Beautiful work, but nothing cheap here for me.
I am no use to you’, I joke, leaving for the Grand Bazaar.
There, a crush of silk, filigreed excess, spiced dreaming,
but nothing strikes me. I know what I want.
Back in your alley, you were on your knees working.
I could draw your hand roughened by carpet threads.
Expert in repair, you take their hundreds of years
in your fingers, making them young again, strong.
You close the holes inside the weave with stitches so fine
no eye could find a flaw in them. See you said, how
carefully matched they are. First, I have to know them,
find their inner story, then re-thread them back.
I bought the bedspread I use now as a tablecloth,
laden heavy with silken ottoman flowers;
rose, gül, tulip, lalé, chrysthanemum, krizantem,
weighted with history, colour still bold after fifteen years.
The light grew soft amber, the old stone walls
lightened, yet the day was fading.
You took me to a smoky café with hookah pipes
burning red with each breath in the black interior.
Shisha smoke of apple and jasmine meandered.
Bare-chested men heaped coal on smoking braziers
at the door; above our dark corner, a heaven full of
Turkish lights shattered by colour. It was old Istanbul.
Conversation in the half-dark. You speak of home.
Malatya, you must go. Apricots are huge as a hand
and so sweet and juicy you might live on them
straight from the trees, warm and so smooth.
I will think of this in the years after, and when I visit
Malatya, eat those fruit: everything you said they are.
And learn one tulip secret: water triggers their stems
to continue growth after being cut, staying fresh longer.
Your girlfriend had been South American but when you
couldn’t bear to leave Türkiye, failed to board
at the last minute, she finished it. Your apartment
is bare you say, but for a bottle of champagne.
Would you like to share it? and I smile.
I could draw your eyes chestnut brown and
their creases curving outwards as if laughter
is their medium reaching for the source of it.
‘I am too old for you’, I exclaim. But, you forget!
you offer. I am an antique carpet restorer!
Surprised, shocked even, we laugh wildly, you
apologizing; me, loving the imagery of it. Tempted.
‘I am meeting a friend’ I lie, and grin all the walk back
to solitude in my hotel. I know what I don’t want.
Next year I walked by with a friend and
you called out my name, beckoned me surprised.
Years later, it’s the night Turkish cities crumple
like paper crushed casually before binning.
I think of apricots, the flushed sweetness of them
on a hot day. I hope dearly you were not home in Malatya.
This is what Stanley Built
Barrack Point, with thanks to Stanley Richard 15.9.1921 – 29.4.2020
Going to bed with the salt crust on me,
hair stiff, smelling it in the house
the breezed fizzing of it
and its waved rhythm all night, shushing it in,
I’d forgotten this is what it’s like
– supposed to be – living by the sea
almost forgotten in these chosen years
of father-caring, covid settled in, pinning me
to the house he built a mile away. Weary,
why did I wait so long for this respite day?
Bathing this morning where Little Lake and
the Pacific meet right outside this old low gate,
memories gritted into pearl and
I carry that sheen on the inside of my skin.
Bedroom bunks in the kids’ room, rush into
recollection those waves of light and buoyant youth.
Here is my childhood in laughter. We thought
the sea was coming inside, its gush and whoosh
a lullaby never forgotten, never replaced.
No footpath, no road, and sand acres surrounding
the house where we all dreamed of nothing.
There was no need; in the moment, everything there.
No dark dank reminders under the house
I grew up in where once the neighbour’s lad
crushed me down under our house, struggling.
Photos in a frame on the wall are black and white
or you might say dusty grey, as if years have simply
aged them, like us. Cousins Cathryn, Anne, Julie, me.
We sit in the shallows, ripples thrilling
our skinny legs when the lake was open
to the sea, no need for reinforcement with
boulders or cement, waters so gentle we children
risked nothing, yet everything was changing.
My father’s impact is here too. A great fisherman,
he once backed his boat in through the front glass
full-length doors! The patio off it was built after that!
On these walls are some works from his retirement.
Leadlight dolphins, bright ultramarine and sea blue,
leaping. The best of his tropical fish lead by Nemo,
though their eyes seem to have disappeared!
And in the children’s room, his glass dragonfly
skims above the bed, hovering protective.
His small wooden dachshund, hidden by departing
family members lured new arrivals into a puppy-hunt.
I searched every cupboard, drawer, even the dryer.
No show. Then looking up, there he is sitting
on the kitchen shelf in full view. Spot; Spot the dog!
Checked bow tie in place, oak legs and ears,
cedar belly and face, and those round blue eyes.
Dad was often back and forth visiting. At 98 years,
his visits are still recorded in the visitor’s book,
bringing duck à l’orange he’d slow-cooked from 7 am.
My mother is here too. Not in the shadows,
but in the briny breeze, the hot deck, the cool shallows.
Thirty years dead, I think she was happy here.
How nostalgia writes our story the way we want it to be.
Three seagulls still fly across the back wall,
and the ping pong table takes up most of the main
room, beside white-studded blue vinyl bench seats,
drawers beneath filled with rugs.
Open a cupboard: puzzles queue out, beside goggles,
and the rubber scent of flipper and snorkel.
Once, there was a kitchen nook, expanded as we did.
White wicker highchairs, with deep blue legs on
sapphire linoleum with faded black captain’s
wheels, their centres holding seagulls in flight,
or red, black and white compasses bedded in. So
his house would always know where it is, facing forward.
This is the humble holiday house that Stan my uncle built.
Well – with S.J Wood and Co. in Parramatta, in 1952.
Transporting everything so far, handwritten bills show
the progress: loads of nails, masonite, guttering, fibro.
A concrete slab beneath the back door steps, since 1958
has captured the footprints of my cousins and their parents.
Out front then was all beach for miles and empty miles.
Beyond, Windang sand-hills later sold to Hawaii
by a council so short-sighted they failed to see
a month in the future, never mind decades.
Flattened now, only the elders remember
sliding down those slopes on old planks
of timber shouting joy, screaming whoopee!
Foolishly, a new council now stacks massive
boulders against the shrinking edge of land
and the sea mocks all efforts at retaining ground.
Now houses crowd in on our block.
Cousins grew children, who grew children
themselves, so this small dwelling cannot
fit them in for one more family Christmas.
This month the house must be razed and soon
a modern duplex, double the size and rooms
will face the ocean wind taking the salt
on its new strong double-glazed windows.
Nothing will rattle. Nothing fall.
The memories remain in our bones. But not
too long ahead my cousin and I will weave
away into our own sea-fret and only faded photos
carry the imprint of a house so full of loving times,
that surely the soil itself will hold them on.
© Robyn Rowland
Robyn Rowland is an Irish-Australian citizen. Living between Ireland and Victoria for 40 years, working in Turkey since 2009, in December 2019 she moved back to Australia as companion then carer for her father, who died at 102. Now living in Victoria, her most recent book is Steep Curve (Five Islands Press, 2024). She has 12 books of poetry, including 2 bilingual Turkish/English: Under This Saffron Sun – Safran Güneşin Altında, (Knocknarone Press, Ireland 2019) and ‘This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş’: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915 (FIP, 2015; repub. Spinifex Press, Australia, 2018). She has won or been listed for various prizes e.g. Myslexia, ACU Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Antipodes: Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature International Poetry prize. Her poetry appears in national/international journals in 9 countries, fifty anthologies, 8 editions of ‘Best Australian Poems’ (Black Inc). She has read in India, Portugal, Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, and is published in translation. She is filmed reading in National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, James Joyce Library, UCD: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7KfJL_otFc