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Katherine Gallagher


Woman in a Tableau
         ~After an incident in the Sahel region, reported by a UNICEF official

dust shadows her face
 
                                    nightmare
 
drought 
 
                                    water polluted
 
the choice between
 
                                    giving her child watery mud
 
and letting him die
 
                                    seeing the choice
 
over and over
 
                                    telling her hands
 
becoming the choice
 
                                    giving the baby poisoned water
 
his tongue burning now
 
                                    forever against hers
 

Kandinsky Journey

black and white etc
all the colours
close as birthdays in retrospect
 
you can join in
become a yellow line
on a red blurred-patch
 
or a ship skidding down
sea-less
 
follow the curves
let them take you
over the skyline
 
when you arrive
at a state of shock
the paradox of colour
will balance you

At the Playground

The March wind whisks against us:
my son, three, starts the roundabout
refuses to get on himself. Today
he has planned ahead, says it's his turn
to push me, watches me on board
and I'm away. I enjoy being passenger,
store all this for later -
the afternoon's lulled moves,
everywhere spring heady
and he in the foreground
racing his years, reminding me
to take care, hang on.
 
The ground spins, blurs; he begs it
with each command, checks
I'm not going too fast.
'You can't fall off,' he says
smiling, assured.
 
I know it, this steady pace
contains us both, days overlap: he will perhaps
never love me more than now.
 

Passengers to the City

This morning she is travelling
eyes steeled on her knitting,
while the man next to her
from time to time turns his head,
glances briefly at the fiery wool
then looks away.
 
He is silent as a guard, and she
never speaks. Are they together, some pair
perfectly joined by silence?
Or are they today's complete strangers?
 
I'll never know, left simply
to knit them together – characters in a story,
a middle-aged couple on a train
waiting for love's fable to happen to them,
for their old lives to be swept aside,
changed, changed – as she keeps knitting,
bumping him occasionally,
at which he shrugs, turns his head quickly
not like a lover, but content. 

The Trapeze-Artist's First Performance

She has practised the tightrope,
daily spinning her taut body
afloat in territory
she would claim as hers.
 
Now the audience is waiting,
they bamboozle her with flowers.
The scene is drunk on air –
its nothingness
that she must navigate.
 
Suddenly her head's a map,
a study in letting go.
Below – the fall, the odds.
 
She throws her act to the audience –
it carries her to them, their rows
of faces. And it is her sky
they give back,
balancing her with their eyes.

Distances

I see my mother waving – her unfussed
smiling au revoir, alone on her verandah,
a small figure half-covered by shadow.

I hold her wave, see myself sharing it
eightfold, once for each of us – a wave
we have grown into

as she perfected it, voiced it over years
listening for the two who died,
losses she carried into her skin,
her children – the only trophies
she ever wanted.

Now I search her face
contained, real as light,
hear over her words sewn into
the wave, 'There are many kinds of love
and I have lived some of them.'

​
Picture
Picture


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Itinerants

Her family remember her from childhood
as the one who travelled brightly
in a big-roomed house,
who always played for time.

For years now I have been following her,
taking on her disguises – globetrotter
bon vivant, tasting in a glasshouse-array.
Sometimes I have wanted to halt, finally settle
but still she lures me on, across each brink.
She is my sister, we live our lives twice over –
times we have seen hemispheres in space
the way a bird might – or finding villages
weft with stories, feeling local again.
Feasts, illuminations, we have taken all
to heart – artefacts, trips out to markets
buying more than we could carry.

I can never quite catch her
nor does she ever let me rest, to shrink quietly
into the hedgehog of my days.
No, there is more, she swears –
her foot a shadow ahead of mine, circling out
saltbush and spinifex before our eyes,
daring me on to the next stage –
to take our lives to pieces,
fossick for new stones.

The Magic of Hands

Put your hands into fire
 
The magic of hands
is rarely celebrated
 
Test your hands
on the heart’s edge
 
 
The music of hands
is born in flame
 
the instinctive touchstone reaching
finally beyond fire
          beyond sign-language
 
to shore each blending
unique as a leap into light

The Long Reach Out of War

They will keep restoring the glass
in broken cathedrals
 
to carry the eye and the colours
that were shattered
 
 
They will keep restoring the stone
in bombed cathedrals
 
to carry the face and the idea
that were crushed
 
 
They will keep carrying the burden
of destroyed cathedrals
 
even as the ashes blow back
 
 
Humanity
keeping faith with itself
even as the ashes blow back
 

Domestic

He tells me I'm the untidiest
nice woman he's ever lived with.
It's our bad joke – I pluck resolutions,
see garbage floating three floors down
have him doing housework,
say we'll eat out, eat less
eat fast, or just let dishes pile up,
find a stairway of paper-plates
to take us right down to earth.

But I don't leave it there,
race through the apartment
picking up papers, carbons,
the half-made poems disappearing
into paper-clips, folders. Suddenly
it's a tidy hinterland –
the desk bare, no books on the floor,
just that coffee-table
better-housekeeping look.

He smiles approval then
our eyes lock together, we purr,
it's love's dream whirring
till I see my two selves again
shadowing each other, colliding –
the writer watched warily by the
Vermeer girl, head down
over her chores.

Chartres Cathedral

The spires lean
into the air
touch the blue inside
of the sky
 
lightly
a philosophy
 
a cathedral
about to lift the world
off its knees

The Survivor
        ~for Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966

A woman sits in a corner of sun
tracing a poem. Slowly
she is woven into it like the day
as smells of burning
carry her outside.

There, soldiers and jailers
are blocking the street,
books are being burnt –
thousands of words collapsing
in on each other. Suddenly
she sees her own fate:
her fellow-poet is taken
leaving her only silence.

She goes back to continue the poem:
it will go on for twenty years
islanded in her head
and Russia will remember her
as a lover
waiting for the ice-walls to break,
for her hermit's cry
to be carried like fire
from hand to hand.
​

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