Famous Reporter 29 (June, 2004): Robyn Mathison - poetry

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Robyn Mathison

 

Running Through the Stars

 

                 Is our old front paddock

               sprinkled once again

               with Early Nancy lilies,

               Anguillaria dioica,

               those harbingers of spring?

 

               It’s over sixty years

               since I picked that first fistful

               to give to my mother

               and the blue glass eyebath

               held those too-short stems.

 

               Is that paddock even still there,

               hiding its secret bulbs

               of Blackman’s Potatoes?

               It might be under houses:

               the town has grown since then.

 

               Perhaps now, in rooms there,

               children wake, puzzled

               by half-remembered dreams.

               Through drifts of Golden Sun-moths,

               they’ve been running barefoot

               in a paddock of Wallaby-grass,

               rough pasture dotted

               with tiny, white,

               purple-hearted stars.