Home
page
Editorial details
Browse
Content samples:
Interviews
Subscribe
Contributors'
guidelines
Contact details |
|
KRISTIN HANNAFORD
Pumpkin Island Notes
Unwinding
- pieces of bone
or coral
- whitening, seared with sun & salt
- it seems this is a beach of shapes
- bleached white alphabets, knuckles,
- ovoids hollowed with stars
- coral bones rippling as water currents
- shaped them in death
- smooth them across your palms, touching
- rubbing this beach over your own bones
- pocket a few
-
- in your room bone pieces rest on bedside tables
- children breathing wave patterns
shush shush
- the island sings, inside you are unwinding
-
- this calm unfamiliar
- from the deck turn those asleep
- beds strung to the ceiling, great blooms
- of mosquito netting
- for the moment you are caught
-
- rocks on the eastern point of island
- flatten towards the ocean
- moon’s light scattered in a thousand pockmarks
of basalt
-
-
- Curlew
-
- Shark fins as waves
- six fins circling in low shin height tide
-
- weave round rock
- the afternoon light sharp jagged
- almost
- too bright for my large eye
- I wait for dark, for the rise of voice
- as motion
-
- the current quickens, this Woppaburra island
- sounds out, a throat song
- ricochets across sand and tussocks
- traveling as the boats head back to the harbour
- a memory of place, sharp as first incision
- Curlew Curlew Curlew
-
-
- Lee side, On board the Triton
- "We can go sailing in, climb down, lose
yourself when you linger long’
- N Finn ‘Into Temptation’
-
- he flexes his hands
- long fingers stiff from hours of net mending
- the still sea extends before him
- a layer of light - silver, pink &
indescribable qualities of blue
-
- climbing over the side of the boat
- he lowers himself down
- his body hardly rippling the surface
- he floats face down and holds out his arms
- suspended on the ocean, imagining the fish beneath
him
- thinking of the numbers of small fish that die
- while he sorts prawns,
- thinking at least that on this small boat
- there is time to save most of them
-
-
- Driftwood
-
- Pandanus woven with netted floats
- we enter her side of the island
- feeling primitive exploratory
- entering a cave of limbs
- knobbed arms of pandanus reach over, they knit us
- into her wall of collections
- fish skeletons and carved driftwood,
- fishing nets, foam buoys and corals
- a life spent dragging the sea.
-
- Bright with talk of her island, she makes us coffee
- sliding into a whistle for the birds
- worrying how her creatures will settle
- as she sells up for the mainland.
- Peachfaces scatter round the kitchen and perch
together
- beaks entwining, they peck and whistle ‘tut
tut tut’
- crab-eyed her vision darts.
-
- Afternoon: I watch her from the beach
- staggering with piles of rubbish
- she sets the forty gallon drum alight
- shadows of wild black smoke
- cover her like crows wings
- her face appearing, flashing in and out of view
- fresh wind off the ocean lashing.
|