Poetry
 
 
 

Helen Hagemann's Poetry & Prose

Country Girl

I grew up loving country songs
like “Lonesome No.1”
and “Folsom Prison Blues.”
I kept a scrapbook of the best,
records flat to my chest.
 

There’s a million sad stories
in books and songs.
There’s a number of sunbeams
you remember at church.
 

There’s a million sad stories
when Jesus wept.
Fishes and loaves feeding the poor.
The poor in a hallway of Lazarus’ steps.
 

There’s a million sad stories
trapped in the wire;
girls and boys
at the back of flywire
dreaming country songs, afternoons,
Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou.
Boys & girls, their hands aloft
in the steady swing of a willow bat.
 

Boys & girls in their Sunday clothes
holding the wire
flying a kite
higher & higher.

Evangelyne

In the days coming to your door
from school, you practising Mozart and Liszt,
I wanted to climb inside your songbook.
Your fingers searched a Viennese waltz,
a melody I longed to play.
Evangelyne, you made lullabies of flight,
lifting me as a heron stretched from a lake.
In the practice of scales, I flew with blue wrens
atwitter in the shadows of leaves.
 

Where are you now, Evangelyne,
so many winters gone from home?
Are you still selling apples in your store,
playing Schubert, Brahms?
I have a daughter who plays,
her voice, mellow between breaths.
The steely notes of her guitar bringing lonesome sounds
of highways & a red suitcase to my door.
 

Like you, she left home to find meadows of stillness.
At the airport, my voice silent as prayer;
her small belongings clumping along
on a carousel to Carlton.
 

Evangelyne, I wish you good tidings, fields of clouds,
blessings from an old churchyard. Remember
how we rocked in the bosom of Abraham?
Remember the Minister’s whistling teeth,
the mischief of our throats?
– all that’s silenced now.
 

When my daughter returns, she opens a window
through a fretwork of strings.
When I listen to Mozart, to Liszt,
you open an old songbook
& the youth we stumbled in.
 

Bulls-Eye

 

Before the nail, before the dartboard, and before
my father fixed a flywire door and spring latch,
the back door was an entrance to Nottingham forest.
My young brother swathed its single skin like a shield.
My older brother quivered arrows in a bow.
Robin & his Merry Men, shadowy figures
in veranda staghorn and elk.
The door flexed, caning muscles,
until the knife split the wood.
My young brother, sick of dying, hurled the sharpest tool
from the shed. His nervous laughter giving in to a cry
of ‘Bull’s-eye! You’re dead.’
Years later, all this speaks of anecdote,
the hole in the door never filled, plywood scared
forever in a dartboard’s pinprick of stars. At the fence,
my father allied neighbours about small violences,
while my young brother vanished three days of the week.
My older brother gauged the battle scar, sucked awe
through his teeth. That was what he wanted,
to stand as one peels back armour,
in pride of his life saved.

Harvest Festival

 

1.The Church
 

A church table assigned to spring.
Peas, lentils, sunflower seeds,
backed by sheaths of wheat,
barley stalks, ascending the altar.
The display this year is a farm's farrago
of maise, artichokes, beans, potatoes;
months of citrus & ginger sweetened in jars.
Impossible to align with comedians, but they are here;
lilac tips on large blooms of gladioli,
magnolia & maidenhair snipped at sunrise.
Harvest festival is a day of singing, rejoicing,
bringing in the sheaves.
 

2. The Dress
 

A girl, delineated, elongated in apricot taffeta,
organdy overlay, files from her choir seat.
All eyes are on her. She is a flower in a field,
handpainted in bell-flower, sweet-pea; patent shoes,
lace gloves, beret snug as a May Gibbs' gumnut
Her dress demands a signal, a swirl–
stimulating communion with her feet.
Rarely is she caught, except today,
flushed out of hiding from behind the church.
At the cake stall, adrenalin is high in her thirsty
overreach for creaming soda - dropped!
A ruby moonbeam now plashed to her skirt.
Sunlight won't bring it out.
Mother & Gran each having a turn.
Her eyes afire in their inquisition.
Mother flaps out the rag-bag. Gran, with hands
full of meaning, says, You will wear the dress again,
when I sew two pockets of leftover bell-flower, sweet pea.
Concealment, or words to that effect,
before a terrifying end
to a beautiful dress.

 


 Read Other Poems from my new collection"Evangelyne & Other Poems"

How to contact me-
Phone on (08) 9343 0072
or Email: Helen Hagemann 

or write for information to PO Box 331, WANNEROO, Western Australia 6946

Copyright 2005-2008 © Unless for the purpose of study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the written permission of the author.

       
 
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