Holbeche Road Dreaming

My eldest daughter, Heidi, wrote this poem back in 2009. She only sent it to me recently, saying that she wasn't sure it was "good enough". I have no words to describe how precious it is...

My mother was a girl once.

Her hair plaited in braids,

Bandy-legs below baby-doll hem.

My mother was a girl.

Once she ran the length of the train

In a superman costume.

My mother was not always a mother.

Her womb woke and,

As the plane hung suspended in the impossibility of air,

An egg split, and split.

My mother was a girl in a cornflower dress

As she walked an aisle.

Swelling beneath her bodice.

Her knees still grazed, she played

With the edges of ribboned plaits.

My mother,

Feet swollen with summer and expectation,,

Watched the mare expect her foal.

We made a bower.

We began a conversation in those lonely times

When you rubbed and sang the world.

The beauty of the rising dust:

Her husband returns to ease

Fatalistic claustrophobia.

The sweaty panic of loneliness.

And fear

Of failing,

Rising like funnel-webs

From the hot, Sydney loam.

My mother and her child shared a private world.

They held their secrets as stones at the bottom of dry puddle.

Waiting for rain.

When you held me you found no metamorphosis.

Instead, all those pebble secrets

Turned into the stars.

We wet them with our stories

So that they could guide us.

And they do.

There. Between you and me, we grew each other up.

March, 2009

Season of grandmothers...

Autumn. You can feel the change in the air. You can feel it in your bones. The back of my house is draped in big grape leaves. The afternoon sun glows behind them. Some are shrivelled and browned.

There is an autumnal sound in the television droning in the next room, soft traffic, suede as velvet, on the South Arm Highway, a high-pitched metal wind-chime outside the backdoor. Mid-March gently puffs a changing season in through the kitchen door. An old woman’s black clothes hang under the shelter of the Laserlite roof. They are mine.


Thinking about it just yesterday, I realised how simple my life is. It’s not simple because of any particular doctrine, but because it has never been anything else. One thing that brings me a lot of joy is the movement of shadows on walls, the movement of flickering light on a rubber-plant leaf. I always think of Gerard Manly Hopkins, and his “dappled things”. 


There is a colourful dream-catcher outside the kitchen window. I am attracted to bright colours like a bower bird or a child. Age has never dampened my love of colour.


Hard to believe that I’m now the grandmother, when, for so long, other women of wide berth, sparkling hairnet, slippery laps, lisle stockings and sensible shoes filled that role...I remember my grandmother's garden...my other grandmother's big brown pennies...Aunty Evvie's soft, powdered cheek...Mary and Nellie Barry's whiskery chins...Minny Cardiff's arthritic hands (with golf balls  in her palms to hold them open)...and now it's me! I'm the grandmother of wiry white hair, worn-out sandals, eccentric clothes and many beads.

Two of my grandchildren- a boy aged nine and a girl of five- were describing my house to someone at a birthday party:-

"It's very colourful!' said the nine-year-old.

"The garden is VERY wild," said my five-year-old granddaughter..."You can play hide-and-seek!"

"Who wins at hide-and-seek?" asked the other adult.

A moment's thinking, and then she piped up with: "Nanny!"


Pied Beauty by Gerard Manly Hopkins