Simeon Kronenberg: “Rain” and “Unaccompanied”

These poems are part of the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks. 

Unaccompanied

Reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage

 

You write of an igniting field,

scrapes on bone

 

about half puddled snow

and lonely souls

 

buried in ill-fitting clothes

or decked on a car ferry

 

as it engines white water

backing in to dock and home,

 

where someone waits with tea

and biscuits wanting news.

 

You watch up close,

but you’re targeted,

 

hedged in, as if discovered

running guns after days of rain.

 

Rain

I love the rain as it clatters

like ceramic beads loosed

from a broken string onto tin

and concrete in Seminyak,

flooding subaks, filling ditches

and potholes. Or, when it drops

onto grass hills in Korumburra,

drenching acacias that lean

like grief over newly pooling ponds,

filling black dams to the rim—

and where, if you walk in slowly,

toes squelch silky bottom mud,

and on the surface your hands

brush away a lace of insects

drowned by rain.

 

Simeon Kronenberg has published poetry, reviews, interviews and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies. He has also published widely on the contemporary visual arts. Distance, Pitt Street Poetry, 2018, his first poetry collection is current.