Selected poems
The quiet assimilators
Take almost any street, in any modern city
And we are there. We are the substrata of society
Ever-present, the unseen lining, the padding in the crowd.
We carry our backgrounds
Closer than our wallets, effortlessly
Yet they inform our every step, invisibly.
Because unlike our children, if we have them,
We were not born in this country we call home
But seduced by the vast air, the swaying gums
And the freedoms they implied, we chose to come.
We bought into the Australian Dream, packaging and all,
Shook off the reassuring, cloying familial ties
Jumped through immigration hoops
Applied for visas and lingered in alien passport queues
Later sealing our legitimacy in citizenship status
And all the while, getting used to new ways
Of doing things.
We have assimilated, oh God have we assimilated
Tailoring ourselves to blend in how we dress,
Our turns of speech, its intonation, and countless other ways
Or so we let ourselves believe
(Until a chance remark, 'And where is your accent from?'
Undoes us in a second.)
So we try just that bit harder, and
Encourage our children, if we have them, just that bit more.
The big divide, you see, never was the traditional culprits
Of language or religion (we've heard it all before),
But this: that we take nothing
For granted.
Yet a kernel of obstinance buds and grows inside us
And we feel, unaccountably and frustratingly,
Growing closer to the land we left behind
Acquiring a latent faithfulness to old ways, rituals and rhythms
Which fix themselves, like beacons in our penumbral minds,
The way we left them years, decades perhaps, ago.
And so the circle closes, leaving us
Respectable citizens of the establishment
Outside, but wavering inside
Daring, in our weaker moments, to wonder
If we ever should have come.
A journey of sorts
You didn't see me
But I turned back
And then for years
Every time I passed that place
I'd see your crumpled form
Wheelchaired across the courtyard
Plastic bracelet pale against your wrist,
Resistance in the set of your shoulders.
Did a lifetime spent abroad
Sliced up between three continents
And all the years of travel
(good luck tiki in your inner pocket)
With its attendant rituals
Of collars pressed and briefcases clicking
Inching forwards in countless check-in queues
Nodding acceptance of clunky hotel keys
Patient layers of rewritten drafts
Pencilled scribbles up and down the margin
Handshakes, boardrooms, coffee in plastic cups
Inhaling overblown officialdom
With cigarettes over too-long lunches
In that quiet way of yours — did all this
Stand you in good stead?
For this, too, was a journey of sorts.
The white gash of your hospital gown
The glow of multicolored monitors
Recording your vital functions
While nurses replenished, adjusted and tweaked
The spaghetti curls of drip lines and silver stands
With which my mother and I did hopeless battle
To ease your situation
Prompting a final, wry quip
And a chuckle from a nurse of stone:
Humour in extremis.
And on the last night
They gave you the last rites
And then we settled down
To wait.
Denise O'Hagan is an editor by trade. She holds an MA in Bibliography and Textual Criticism and has a background in commercial publishing. She works as an editor with independent authors and is Poetry Editor for Australia and New Zealand for The Blue Nib.