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.