POETRY
      Maria Zajkowski — 'From the manual of time; now, me and you'

I’m looking at a century or two; we’re somewhere in there,
maybe our births will be noted if we’re lucky, maybe not if things are as they are.
When I’m two hundred years old I’ll look into the crowd and still pick you.

Alas it’s all gone to pot in most ways. Lucky that when we are pages in some old temple
in our fallen (now falling) civilisation that someone will have pressed
my cheek against yours.

Gravity at least still functioned after the destruction of most of what we knew;
my house, your house, our favourite songs, the corner where I met you with flowers
and where you met me with flowers, our preferred routes away from the uncertain crowds.

Some of them were outraged, most of them not, at those few whose decisions
closed gates, erased births, who ate the finest quails raised by children.
It will all be omitted, as the truth often is.

Pens will be broken while still in our hands so it cannot be written about.
There will be no official letter to confirm how I ranged the outskirts of my life
and miraculously found you where not even a saint would send a prayer.

We renovated our remaining lives in secret, working late into the night almost in silence
and fully moved into our bodies at last which was not in the council’s plans
but what they didn’t know…

It has however been registered that you discovered me and we are our own remnants,
our own philosophies and friends, always friends, on any night, in any age,
simply we are have forever been in love with me and you.

Maria Zajkowski is an award-winning poet, lyricist and librettist based in Melbourne. A regular collaborator with composer Wally Gunn, her first collection The Ascendant features on the Grammy nominated album Render by Roomful of Teeth and as a standalone EP through New Amsterdam Records. Her first libretto, Moonlite, a true crime queer love story based on Captain Moonlite and his lover James Nesbitt, premiered in the US in 2019. Maria launched two collections in Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021; What we have except when we are lost, written with MTC Cronin (Spuyten Duyvil, NY), and Icon.