POINT OF BALANCE   Easter 1997

A quiet time nudging the old

into another season.

A pause in the blood, a slant in the eye

questions the tilt of the future;

wind and ocean cycle

their spiralling rhythm.

Day a knife rubbing skin.

Late sun hot above the tree burns

through windows open to the west.

Leaves talk wind, shimmering.

Surf in the east shouts southerly blown

against its rim, calls evening up its sand;

roughly calling up the night moon.

When leaves lie dark and still across

its face, the water falls, whispers

ebb into morning to rise with the sun

repeat and repeat not weighing possibilities.

You learn about loss, balance scales,

hear animals call for mating,

cicadas urgent for another season.

WESTERNPORT

1. The View South

The suit and tie, slightly overfed,

sedentary, shabby in a satisfied

suburban way  bridles at the mention:

Melbourne, he says, does not think much

of Westernport.

Indeed, why should the city care

for sea grass beds, fish nurseries ,

molluscs older than the island or the bay.

The suit has a clean house, air-conditioning

ducted heating, security doors, locks

and a reliable alarm.

Beyond his fence suburbs reach

into the catchment, provide run off

held for years in the bay’s slow tides,

its circular currents.

2.  Looking East

Across the water wind, breakers and storm,

Embrace the island where tides

hide lamp shells  breeding as they did in

Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian time:

three  hundred million years of life

the suit does not think much of

behind his fool-proof door.

ALL HALLOWS EVE

31st October

The time of the last winter flowers

before dry summer, grass still green,

callistemons bright as blood, the old

hawthorn hedge, immigrant

from another hemisphere, a shabby memory

of early spring, the first cicadas.

For one day an inherited ceremony

tips the slant of seasons. While sunlight fills

with summer, night calls up dark winters'

ancient libations, cakes and fire for returning souls.

Slow night and a changing moon allow entry

to an older darker time to honour the soul's need.

Swallows know it is the time to return

to breed, to nest under the verandah.

HERACLITUS AT THE BEACH

Night fires in the hills drive into daylight.

Along the coast a north wind, and thunder

in the west argue with sheltering trees

flinging heads and full arms

at the south. Rain joins the exchange.

The house a cup of burnt wind.

Tree smoke sours morning. Tainted wind

licks grassland. Storm water flattens

pasture. A sudden river drains into the sea.

We hear minute by minute calls

on the radio. The face of the front page

glares yellow and red, projects the rim of loss

from blackened hills into dry afternoon.

After the rain we live hot day into the glow

of a hot moon, full, yellow and slow

across thick night. The ocean's voice,

the pounding tide, confirms

the brotherhood of fire and water.

WINTER SEASONS

Through dry years’ cracked

earth and slow days the sea’s

indifference to death beats

pulses you can touch, taste, hear.

Storm drives cold into the sea.

Weak branches fall before wild

turbulence and no hurt healed.

The year sends harder storm.

Leaves stripped, broken crowns,

raw limbs scatter like bones. Grey

headlands fade where all land ends

in saturated air and death is present.

Above land, sun’s cold white disc

full behind obscuring cloud;  bird-grey,

holds no unease; feather-quiet

colours shore’s firm sand like skin

where earth’s pulse endures

knowing death.

WE WALKED THERE

We walked there, steps slowing;

always an horizon beyond the promontory

open to all winds; the path

a firm edge free of breaking waves.

Wild tides have covered that old edge,

footprints gone into the flood, the wind,

the rotation of spheres, the dance of galaxies.

New sand, fresh washed has filled prints

on the old beach, mounded spent sea grass,

lifted weed and sand above granite.

Sandfalls embrace samphire’s new hold

on the shifting edge.

The soft sea's slow ebb reflects cloud,

sunlight and night when the flood

comes again, in that place

we will never walk again.

EDGE

I

In the mouth of the river wind lifts rising water: the sea speaks.

Muffling snow invades the high country. Here the sea

leaves offerings on the land: torn weed, old sea grass,

embryos, skeletons, grit washed from another edge

and ash solute in the world's flow.

Each border building higher on itself.

High cloud, different winds, bring soundless snow

to the mountains, a year's water for the land. Here the wind,

cold and sharp as hail and the inexorable sea's voice assault

the shore, cut water to fragments, leave samplers: drowned birds,

shearwater's legs bluer than the sky, the delicate curve

of the egret's golden bill, dark cormorant, smokey petrel,

driven to the edge, founding new land.

II

This day walking a clean shore I can whisper to the sea, hear

a reply. It has covered its gifts with storm. The river turns

against our barriers: red gum pillars, iron bolts, to flow east

with the earth's spin eating the border of confinement.

The morning people of the shoreline exchange

greetings, talk of the storm, of rhythms

that silence life, verify that soul inhering in the sea,

the land, the earth's wind.

EQUINOX

Grass from summer flowering fields

that sheltered spawn, fry, fingerlings

for the future, where lamp shells breed

out of that distant past before our eyes

looked across the water, has shed

its summer leaves, given them to the tide.

Driven ashore leaves heap thick

and dark along the sand to populate the shore

to a new depth, a new border between elements.

In this  season of light and dark, a cyclic round

renews ocean’s unseen nourishment

from underwater pasture, root, leaf, flower.

Connie Barber

Acknowledgement

THE GREAT OCEAN AND THE SEA was short listed for the Newcastle Prize in 2005, published in their CD The Cool Breath Burn and in Beyond Headlands  Five Islands Press  2006.