A Pain Around My Shoulders, as Ritual
I like the lawn’s yellow flowers
Lovely weeds, welcome!
I presume it’s seasonal
growth
Happy grass
as shadows recede in morning
Make sure the gate catches
The way requires obstacles
and rusty handles
Everywhere time is
the passing passes
into the future, the past
not history that’s made
of what’s counted
rather than what’s dreamt
by everyone present
the magic elements
love and despair
awe and boredom
or simply that pain
around the shoulders
my own ritual like a brace
before gates and doors
Or repetitions
a sip of something else
the river’s metal
its spume and shade
its spawn and bloom
Jill Jones’ most recent books are Brink, Breaking the Days, shortlisted for the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize, and The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the 2015 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award for Poetry. A new book, Viva the Real, is due from UQP in late 2018. Her work features in recent anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.