Sitting with an ancient and tiny Russian lady...She is quite blind, and wears big, cushiony slippers on her feet. She talks about the war, all the while smoothing a paper tissue onto the head of her walking stick. I wish I could remember every word she said, and how she said it.

- Tell us, Mama, is it true? her kids would ask, after watching some war movie on TV...Is it true, what they say about the war?

- It is true! she said, nodding her head. - It makes me so mad, she says to me.....when Australians complain. We are so lucky in this country! I say to them, you are so lucky. You have never been hungry! When I walked with my kids, and I saw bread that someone had thrown on the ground, I would say: If you ever see bread that someone has thrown away, pick it up and bring it home. No, you don't have to eat it, but you can bring it home, cut it up into little squares, and put it out for the birds to eat...So they did that...

I was only seventeen. My Mama would look out the window, and I would ask, What is it, Mama? She would say: I cannot tell you now, but I will tell you soon, when you are old enough...One day soon. Because she knew what was coming.

- What was it like when they dropped the bombs, my kids would ask...

-They would fly over, they would circle, and they would look at their maps, then they would open up underneath the plane, and they would drop the bombs, just like that. I would get the people in my building down into the shelter. First, I would go to the fourth floor. It was hard. They were old, and it was dark. They had to feel their way. When I got them all own there, they would ask me: Will we be okay? I would tell them, We will be okay! but what did I know? I was only seventeen. Then Hitler sent all of the young people to Germany, and he sent the German young people to Russia. I did not want to go. I knew if I went, I would never see my mother and father again...

- Did you see your mother and father again?

This time she whispers...- No, I never saw my mother and father again.

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Li(ber)ation

 Fiction by Philomena van Rijswijk – Locative Magazine

You're not a real poet...

 You're not a real poet until the words frighten you so much that you can't write them down...

(Journal,

22/10/24)

The Smell of his Room that Year

 

I think I believed he was a Martian for about a year.

I must have been four,

aware, as I was, of the polished dining-room floor.

I remember I was very close to it.

And he must have been five-and-a-half.

And it was the only thing he ever told me that wasn’t true.

 

There were other things that I didn’t want to know:

that an Atom Bomb might blow up the world;

that the lounge-room fights, every night,

were not all Daddy’s fault.

 

He explained osmosis for me,

and I got into trouble at school, when I already knew

that three take away five is minus two.

In his sleep he would recite A squared plus B,

and he told me that popular was just another word for phoney.

He told me how love was a kind of decision you made, right or not.

His Teilhard de Chardin books at the head of his boy-bed, and he wrote…

Life is a blank page, and you are my dot.

 

The Day of the Triffids was juvenile, he said,

lying in bed with his arm broken in three places,

a tiny transistor radio always within reach.

I remember the close smell of his room that year-

it was the smell of a man taking a boy’s place

inside a chrysalis of plaster.

 

And I wonder, sometimes, whether even the story of being a Martian

was not a lie, but an attempt to describe

his inexplicable arrival in such a foreign place-

like when Baby Superman was wrapped and sent

in his interstellar baby capsule

to end up living with Mr and Mrs Kent.