Mangoes, poems by Lee Cataldi
Lee Cataldi was born in 1942 in Sydney Australia. She grew up in Tasmania, went to university in Sydney, then as a post-graduate to Oxford, England. Subsequently she lived and worked in England, then returned to Australia in 1974. She taught English for six years in an inner-city high school in Sydney, worked as a teacher-linguist and then a field linguist in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Her publications are; three books of poetry, Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party, The Women who Live on the Ground, and Race Against Time, also, A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, with Peggy Rockman Napaljarri Yimi-kirli, Warlpiri Narratives and Histories, and with Tjama Napanangka a Ngardi-English Dictionary. In 1998, she spent three months in India on an Asialink Fellowship. Now she lives in the southern Mt Lofty Ranges and breeds horses.
mourning is women’s business
for Tjama
1
with a gesture as large as the planet
you call up the spirits of women
tonight you can see them thousands
filling up the country so it is
no longer empty
and lonely as it will be
when you are gone
and the multitudes no longer
dance across the spinifex
2
you were dancing
a slow skip
in the grand style
wearing a striped pointed hat
and white ochre
all your golden hair
cut to the grey
you go on without them like those
wounded in the leg
limping
dancing towards the embrace of the others
who limping
dance towards you
when the circles of recognition are complete
after days and weeks of sitting in the dust
you can get up wash go home
back to your places of employment
and the free spirit will burst
out of this belly of grief
into the air
3
when you were young you went to law
childless but free
now the funerals string together
narratives of loss
how hard it is
to think any more of forever
sometimes
you want private you want
out fold your shirt over your chest
and yourself up to sleep
your stomach hurts
with grief
when you were young and went about your business
who would have thought it would end
covered in white clay in a row of widows
seeing the land losing its people
your stomach hurts
and it’s hard to breathe
tears
your tears
are warm upon my face
would be
warmer on my thigh
your tears
undoing
history could stop them
my history
mangoes
suddenly I saw us
eating mangoes all
inhibitions gone drunk again
and young
our faces
pressed against each otherour noses
deep in sweet yellow mango flesh
our eyes
blinded with pink mango light
surrounded by crushed and rotting fruit together
under the hot dark tree
Aaron
Aaron Baajo Japangardi age
fourteen of Balgo doesn’t want
his aunt’s stories or her dreams
of an outstation at a spot
where two men changed the universe
he wants
to fuck and take drugs and get
his gorgeous arse to dance parties
and be picked up
by rich older men
the opening of the children’s centre in Balgo
a smell of frying meat
drifts across the scene
and steam
from bloodwood leaves assists
departing souls to leave
a tiny child
hurls a rock across the yard
some skills die hard
it is as if the language
centre that was here
had never been the kukatja books
into which we put
our black and white lives have become
art works no-one can read
these days Balgo is a picture
and for sale
© Lee Cataldi