Sarah Day’s Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry) was published in 2022. Her previous books have won the Queensland Premier’s and ACT prizes and been shortlisted for the NSW, Tasmanian Premier’s, and Prime Minister’s awards. She has collaborated with musicians, and judged national poetry, fiction, and nature-writing competitions. Her poem, ‘l’Orpheline’, was shortlisted in this year’s Peter Porter Prize.
The Boys of my Childhood
The boys of my childhood frightened me
with their rituals of violence,
their drive to bear and inflict pain
with clear-eyed sang-froid.
The rites were an introduction of sorts
to torture, sometimes self-imposed –
contests staged to see whose thumbs and hands
blackened under elastic band and rope duress.
Boys, wrists bound behind, were hoisted by other boys
onto fences, tipped blood-faced into dust.
A mother’s whip could not deter their hunger for annihilation,
their hunger for ritualised endurance,
and their dogged refusal to cry. In their darkened home
Mary, her defenceless heart bleeding, looked on.
I came from a family of girls,
these were my earliest encounters with boys.
My first love, the sun in my life,
hurt himself dreadfully in ways too many to list
and died at last by his own hand.
I’m thankful I had a father who disdained violence,
who talked to magpies, tiger snakes, and blue tongues,
He taught me to use a hammer and nail and tinsnips,
to sing and whistle, showing, by example, the imagination
is a free place, encouraged me to cross into it, regularly, often.
What are We Missing?
Sometimes what is invisible comes to light
so that the eye picks up
in a forest passed through daily,
a frogmouth or two on a branch,
then the parallels of bleached trunk
and zebra light recede
and the mind focuses only on the night jars
plumped against the cold, side by side on the sheerest twig.
The way the brain selects and rejects
so that passing through sclerophyll
in early morning light you may see everything
and miss the birds
that are in plain sight before you,
or you may come to see what is invisible.
A mystery – that you could look and not see,
that the night jar become instead of an absence
a living gaze who meets your own.