Heresy Her\sea
Just as sea urchins are aligned
with the biological calling of a
mustardy full moon rising
so too are poetesses,
beneath nocturnal shoreline
floorboards
we gather like alphabetical clams
heightened by knee bones
ankled by mangroves
waiting in canopy for
monarchal
tide to arrive
squid ink glazing
between teeth
spilling dance and prose
until we can spill no more,
stretching and kneading
sandcastles across garret
sheets of wide-brown clay feet
atop arthropodal hamlets
a coattail page,
beneath the sea’s
quietening parlance
a herstorical rage
silhouetting with moon
untailored by breath
rib caged by waters
poetica lunae
feasting her\seas
waiting as patiently as
ancient tongues,
the giver of — giving
In the Middle of Analysis
In the middle of the night
in the middle of a shared pandemic
I lay on my back not falling to pieces
in the middle of the clay-pans
in the middle of three-ways
I am falling into peace
concealing my eyes in the middle of rapture
inhaling their Requiem of silence in D Minor
I frolic in the middle of denial
if it pleases the jury of midnight recovery
and all that glitters is not quite sold
I crave the cravings of my Jewish lover
her middle-finger figure-skating around
the outskirt of my arching sovereign mouth
over there, where — against the rocks of
somebody else’s songlines
she and her gather well-heeled
in the middle of an open fire-engine-red
chaise longue
pressing if we must
into scalloped watercolours
dividing rehearsals all over again,
and again, and again
in the middle of a raftless desert-sea
I catch a fallen star from the ankle of
a petulant Milky Way
placing it firmly inside
my lover’s middle pocket
in the middle of nowhere
yet someone else’s somewhere
remunerating each other’s
unravelling limbs in dialogue
for spare body parts
suddenly, in the middle of the most
unordinary stanza
I choose to release her Hebrew stare
in the middle of a shared odyssey
halfway through mid-sentence
syphoning the foam
between Scylla and Charybdis
ego aside
my therapist survives
whilst I, the sometime poet
by the bye return to my lovers’
unpublished womb
The Blackfella
I am, I said it, I know it, I own it
I am the blackfella who was born into an expansive family of exceptional black love.
I am that blackfella who grew up the youngest of five children, raised at the kitchen dining table of superior black knowledge encompassing storytelling literature, sporting excellence, higher education, politics, justice, ancestral discourses of rivers, lands, skies and spiritual environments.
I am the blackfella who was raised listening to her parents, aunts and uncles at the altar of deep respect, manners, attention to detail and humility.
We, like so many families in our tight-knit, pruned carnations, manicured lawns’ south-western suburban community are that blackfella family who grew up in multiple worlds of neighbourhood camaraderie uprising in the pursuit of equitable educational and social community development for students and elders; I am that blackfella who benefited from parental hard yakka and home ownership borne from working-class grit built into the sandstones of intergenerational fingernails. For such families it was never just another day in the colony, Inala East 4077 was the colony, the colony of neighbouring champions who rolled sleeves up and gave it an almighty fair go. My parents and neighbouring families were not flash nor flushed with bungoo, to the contrary, they scrimped and scraped their way through those earlier years to provide for their children what they never had.
Today, Inala is a thriving multi-lingual melting-pot of who’s who blackfellas, whitefellas and faces from lands I had only ever read about from cover to cover every other weekend at the local council library corner (of Rosemary and Abelia streets) throughout the Hawkeism, Thatcherism, Reaganism ’80s. That was the Inala I grew up in.
4077 continues to grow as a large sprawling inter-generational, internationally celebrated multicultural suburb with enormous vibrant public festivals held throughout the year highlighting Australian history and diverse cultural community gatherings while maintaining with gusto its proud strengthening indigenous roots.
Am I not doubly blessed to have been born and raised by two immeasurable parents whose bloodlines are now my grandchildren’s collective story lines. Am I not doubly blessed that our shared herstory\history without deviation or pause pulsates beneath the consciousness of a salient cultural growth from one generation to the next.
Moving in silence throughout south-east, western, central and far north Queensland; my parents’ ancestral lands speak directly to me through night skies, totemic marsupials and otherworldly birds whose feathers and skins continue to roam the wishbones of these lands — just as they did once upon a dusk.
Quietly footsteps walk beside me, they protect me, they guide me, shhh — in clevering way, blackfella old ways, spirit walk with me.
***
These poems are excerpted from Fitzroy North 3068 by Yvette Henry Holt, available from Upswell Publishing.
The book will be launched on May 9 in Brisbane at Avid Reader Bookshop, and on June 18 in Sydney at Poetica.
In Fitzroy North 3068 multi-award-winning poet Yvette Henry Holt climbs in and out of her subconscious abode to take the reader on a global psycho-geographical journey of literal and metaphorical wonderment commencing from Inala East to East London, Melbourne to Memphis, Athens to Komodo Island. Spliced with psychoanalysis. Peppered with addiction, reflection, and faith — Yvette Henry Holt owns everything that exits her mouth and then some. Grounded in impossibly ravishing language, wisdom experience and wit this is a hauntingly statuesque collection of truth, revelations, matrilineal memory, humour and cultural reverence. Once you open this book, you cannot unopen it!
Yvette Henry Holt heralds from the Bidjara, Yiman and Wakaman nations of Queensland. A multi-award-winning poet, essayist, editor and an accomplished social landscape photographer, Yvette has been a pillar of First Nations literary leadership and an executive of Australian literature nationally and internationally for more than two decades. Yvette’s writings have been translated into multiple languages for more than two decades both online and traditional format. Yvette’s poetic lyricism reflects a baseline of psychogeographical and psychoanalytical reflecting global travel, therapy, desert dwellings and matrilineal herstory. Yvette best describes herself as the occasional poet.