Selected poems
Its fur so shining-smooth
We couldn't bear to kill it in the end,
the bright-eyed rat that hid,
all unhygienic, in the walk-in robe,
sleeping in amongst our clothes
and, one night, in a shoe.
Our foolish cat had chased it from the wild
and lost it in that crowded human space
headlong up the walls,
its narrow whiskered snout so ratty-cute,
its fur so shining-smooth,
its cunning tiny paws
gripping the smooth sheer paint
in rodent terror.
Our cat watched for the small beast
through one long night,
his blue eyes shining eerie
in the dark. Sometime round three,
he even knocked the shoe the rat hid in
down to the floor, but lost his prey again
amongst too many scarves.
I spent the next few days and nights
of splintered sleep piling up
great heaps to wash and disinfect
once the poor beast was gone.
It's all been wiped with disinfectant now,
or washed and hung in sunshine and fresh air.
I'd never pitied Herakles before.
The problem in the wardrobe wasn't
so much Augean filth;
Ratty's small spoor was a sprinkling
of needles in a haystack.
It's harder than you think,
to wash a whole haystack.
The cat was less than helpful,
sulking beneath the king-sized bed,
useless as vain Achilles pretending
not to care.
At last, I caught the rat
(inside another shoe)
under a basket.
Success; but Ratty
was a neighbour now.
The tiny beast had lived too close to us,
too long, scuttling up blank walls
and dropping into shoes.
It knew all our clothes.
Even the sudden merciful blow
from the heavy brick was not acceptable.
We could no more bear to kill the rat
than kill the silly cat who'd brought it here.
This one had won its freedom.
It twitches long whiskers and scuttles
up bulrushes, now, in the small wetlands
that pass for the Elysian Fields around here.
Live long and prosper, little rat.
Some slight redemption
Coventry Cathedral had been bombed,
I knew, during the last great conflagration
of the world,
had lost some of its roof
one night of far too many deaths —
though nothing to the horror
our own side rained,
flaming, down onto Dresden.
I had some vague idea
the church had been rebuilt —
another war memorial.
Not even close.
High-windowed walls
stand tall around
paved empty sacred space
big as a playing field,
wide open to the sky.
Stumps of once-proud columns
rise lower than my knees.
Some of the stone walls
still hold window lead,
maybe a little fractured glass
but not a hint of roof.
The fabric of the building
tattered stone and iron lace;
the light behind it blinding blue,
or dumping summer rain.
In not-so-distant Oxford
each church, it seemed,
held its small monument to martyrs
of the Reformation. Always
Catholics and Protestants alike,
never just one side.
Never a hint which One True Church
might have been right, the plaques
so careful in their shame
and generosity.
Each time I saw a sign,
I tried to hide the tears
that stabbed my lids.
I couldn't hold them back
in Coventry. The monument
is not to war
nor even peace
but to forgiveness.
A modest painted board
where the altar must have massed
before the bombs
asks over and over
Father forgive
even the German aircrews
those who sent them
and they themselves,
for their own part.
That would have been enough
to burst the floodgates.
But deeper
in the open body of the ruin
another sign backs practical love
everywhere —
food and wells and
medicine for all;
and, most unbearable, finds
some slight redemption
in the re-creation, stone
by fire-bombed-stone,
of Dresden's own
high-domed cathedral.
Writing workshops at the Muslim School
The flowers in the garden
of the inner-city Muslim school
are kangaroo paws just like mine at home —
hot pink, well mulched with bark.
One of the bright-eyed headscarfed girls
shows me her Dickens-Austen mix.
Dashing from room to room, from class to class,
I can't quite concentrate, but I'm impressed.
'Miss, are you married?'
I tell them that the hoplites in formation
were the tank of the fifth century BC;
that ancient Greeks had no tomato sauce,
chocolate or even tea; that the marble
columns everywhere — so pale, so elegant —
were painted red and green and blue
with gilded bits; that statues wore
bright-coloured robes, and even jewellery.
'Miss, have you got kids?'
During the Peloponnesian War, farmers
and village-folk from all of Attica were sent
for safety from the Spartans' swords
within their city Athens's thick stone walls,
thousands of refugees penned up
like sheep waiting for death.
The Plague killed
one in three of them.
I ask the kids to pick a character
and write a sentence or a paragraph
to start the telling of those lives cut short.
A tragedy so far away in space and time
is made brand-new, but still as sad,
by Aussie Muslim hands and shiny minds.
Jenny Blackford's poems have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Going Down Swinging and Westerly, as well as The School Magazine and various anthologies. Pitt Street Poetry launched her first full-length poetry collection, The Loyalty of Chickens, in April 2017.