Selected poetry
Dancer
Reflections on The inner stillness of Eileen Kramer
by Andrew Lloyd Greensmith
I do feel that I'm full of this beauty of breath. Breath is life.
– Eileen Kramer, 2017
1
Sometimes, time
is against you, it is your enemy
and sometimes it is with you
as you walk on, dance on
through the wilds of your life –
as if time, also, has learnt
to breathe in deeply,
hold, accept,
breathe slowly out –
relaxing into
the pure moment of itself.
2
What might someone,
now and always a dancer,
still teaching others
how to craft and shape
the spirit of dance,
look like, at the age of
102?
I'm standing before
the portrait of a woman
with closed eyes,
her hands delicately cupping,
almost, her tilted head.
In her face, in her composure,
a flower-like serenity
that speaks of
care, reverence,
a thankful communion
with life's gifts of
sacred energy, awareness, time.
The weave of her russet dress
is shadowed,
glazed by light.
She meditates –
at the mercy and yet,
and yet,
utterly, enduringly, present.
3
The painter, a plastic surgeon
of the face and head –
knowing, therefore
all too well, how to read
the contours of malaise –
now gives us this reading
of beauty, of William Blake's
'the human form divine'
and we are invited
to contemplate how
dance
is rooted in silence, stillness –
silence, a way of hearing the music that never stops
stillness, a way of hearing that silence
4
Once, so long ago,
I saw a dancer in performance
begin to shape
an arm movement,
a meditative arc,
more slowly, it seemed,
than the others around her
as if letting the lit air
carry her arm's weight,
yet completing that gesture,
that act of belief, first,
its grace vibrating
in now silent
space.
5
Once, so long ago,
two of us sat high on a hill
watching our friends dance below,
circling each other on the grass
wildly, yet as one.
When I said, with irony,
'We are up here,
looking down at the Dance of Life',
his response was:
'You can only see the Dance of Life
if you are in it.'
Dusk came,
the dancers danced on.
——
'Dancer'
The inner stillness of Eileen Kramer by Andrew Lloyd Greensmith is included, with information on Eileen Kramer and on the artist, in the section on The Archibald Prize for 2017, artgallery.nsw.gov.au
'the human form divine' is from William Blake's poem, 'The Divine Image'.
Archibald Prize 2017 finalist Andrew Lloyd Greensmith, 'The inner stillness of Eileen Kramer' © the artist. Photo: Felicity Jenkins, AGNSW
'A History of the Lotus'
For months, alluringly,
the title floated in my mind,
yet I held back –
the research, without horizon
and the lotus itself, ineffable:
each gold-centred bloom
an icon of sacred wholeness;
trillions of them gracing lakes,
waterways, across millennia.
At last, a hasty first draft in hand,
I sat in the Gardens by the lotus pond,
there to drink coffee with a friend
while scoping each other's poems
for flaws, for modest bounties.
When its moment came, the page
curled into a scroll then was unfurled
by a waspish wind, borne aloft
and delivered like a letter into
a glimmer between lotus leaves.
The sun sparkled. The poem,
unretrievable, slanted skywards for now
amid chalices of white glass
tinctured with the pinks of amaranth, coral
and, movingly, the skin of that young raven
glimpsed beneath wind-parted plumage
as it stepped over the lawn, hesitant,
its eyes in thrall to the newness of all life.
In the hazy, aromatic air
the lotus flowers, loftily poised
above their leaves, became
for a paused second,
an array of lamps
within a library
where a florilegium
lay open to reveal
a lotus – itself a book,
composed of sculpted pages
encircling each other,
each lit from within.
Time then flowed forward
as I contemplated
the random poetry of drops,
fine as perfume spray,
upon those veined, succulent pages,
some capturing the shine of other drops
and even that ultimate glint
on its own blue page,
the sky of this day.
At the Solstice
Days of the dragonfly, the cicada.
Yet even in this mild zone
an upheaval of plenitude –
a month's rain in one day
bathing the deepest roots.
I lie meditating, break off
to scribble notes for a poem,
this poem, resume slow breathing.
In the room somewhere
a page falls to the floor.
At just this moment I recall
the decades of melancholia, despair –
small change in the scheme of things.
Another lifetime would be needed
to voice my thankfulness for the rest.
To the bay! – with sightings en route
of a blackbird whose closed beak
holds a bead of sunlight,
a ribboned skyburst of mynahs,
each white wing patch, irradiated.
The cliffs with their wild gardens.
Down the slopes, agapanthus,
silver-green succulents,
by the path, clumps of tea tree,
gorse, sea-heath, saltbush.
Within the bars of a leafy cage
a splendid fairy-wren takes pause
as if to contemplate his options –
all simple, all blue.
Swallows orbit, never mistaken,
while high above, the inspirational
dignity of ibis, with one shared goal,
tending the spaces between –
a calibrated closeness amid
knots, velleities of air.
The sky, the sea – two kinds of
transparency, almost seamless.
Later, dusk winds will draw
darkness up through the waters,
scrawls of ink on glistening pages.
Diane Fahey’s fourteenth poetry collection, Glass Flowers, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in November. She has been the recipient of various poetry awards and writing grants, and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UWS. She lives on Wadawurrung Country, in a bayside town on the Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria. dianefaheypoet.com