Rosanna Licari

Samples of poems

The following poems appear in the collection, Earlier (Ginninderra Press, 2023)

Earlier

After The Hymn of Creation, Rig Veda (10:129)

Perhaps, the loneliness wanted

to share its darkness,

to jounce its inert insomnia,

blow form into the shapeless nothing

that surrounded it.

So it spoke with a brilliance

that was wide and fierce.

The flame of a million stars.

Violence that creates

and destroys

and pleasures itself

with its own force, timbre and breath.

Then, a moving mass,

matter that slowly found its form

expanding into black,

dividing, forming and reforming into a planet:

a molten, metal-laced vat.

Chambers of magma collapsed

lava spread, hardened,

molecules aligned to form the blue

above and below.

Then the freeze, the thaw and refreeze,

a play of cycles.

The plants came,

in water they spawned then shifted to land.

In an act of longing,

ferns stretched and branched,

a hint of things to come.

The large humid mass that was forest

populated a vast continent

that would crack apart

as simply as a dry twig.

Those left behind in the shifting sea,

apertures filled with stomach and intestine,

brushed against the scales of fish

which were jammed with tiny

multiplying rainbows.

Elliptical bodies governed by fins and tail

sliced through water

then scurried onto sand, rock and earth

to begin a scion, forged

with muscle, tendon, bones,

to crawl, lift head and tongue

to smell the air and warm

on the soft clay

and from this, scripture’s hand

would mould us.

Feathers sprang from limbs

which became legs with claws, wings

spreading into the world of flight.

Then an egg transformed.

In a dark red womb,

a half met another to form

and divide inside a body

to build tissue, veins, blood

a beating heart −

the muscle of life.

And after, a whole

that was wet and shiny

slowly birthing head first.

Still attached to its mother

in anticipation of their separation

it would cry out.

Our ancestors looked up.

Above the trees,

the pleated clouds spread

into a fleece gaping with blue sky.

The tribe caught insects,

ate them with the fruit

that hung from branches and vines.

They swang upside down,

then climbed to the ground

and stepped out

with a bipedal stride,

past the roar and screech

of the other animals.

They gripped flint spears

and but for pelage, walked naked

through wind and savannah,

their dark eyes fixed on the horizon.

Drifters

A mass of water

churns tropical waters,

reaching a submerged landscape

of hulking cliffs and volcanoes

along the east Australian coast.

The current rushes up time-hardened rock

infusing minerals through the deep

and the water columns shoot

towards the light:

the upwelling

nourishing the saltwater and conjuring

the humblest of flora —

phytoplankton: drifting plant, a Greek derivation.

The surface is where they bloom

in sunlight.

A microscope reveals

diatoms fashioned

as delicate, sparkling jewels

or curios

moulded as intricate glass.

There is even the mythological —

half-plant, half-animal: dinoflagellates

a creature that can have the tiniest eye

or devour their own kind.

All these meshed into our existence

by the ocean’s feeding cycle:

plankton > fish > us.

We depend on their rhythm—

exhaling,

the drifters cocoon the Earth with

the blue haze we breath

(its inception in the unimaginable past)

& their cloud-seeding gas

spreads through evaporation, swelling

cumuli that wander

like pregnant dugongs

over humid, verdant canopy.

On the rainforest floor,

the three-toed tracks of cassowaries.

The rumbling weather echoes in their throats.

Note:

Phytoplankton forms the basis of marine food chain and produces 50% of the planet’s oxygen through photosynthesis. As well, it releases DMS (or dimethyl sulfide) which is a cloud-seeding gas.

The following poems won the 2011 Wesley Michel Wright Prize in Poetry.

The judges decided that “Rosanna Licari should receive the prize for her stunning poems, which were delightfully succinct, exhibited great poise in their diction, were often humorous, and had an affective power without sentimentality.”

The future as an island

Clouds sprawl over the backbone of the range,

muslin curtains blow over my head,

as cicadas drone with the ease of monks.

In the scrub, the trees are mute.

I have collected leaves in paper envelopes.

I pick up a book from the table

the pages are rippled dry. Stiff

from a downpour of summer rain.

A water stain forms part of a coastline

on the inside of the back cover.

From one perspective a jutting boldness

of continent, and from another, a peninsula

the future as an island.

In between the pages, his letter from the Cape.

He says the humidity has changed

me. I have merged with the stone lands,

become one of the hard people who

sleep in dry riverbeds, and

break sentiments over boulders.

Motives are impossible to decipher

between his commas and clauses.

I slide the letter back into the book.

A pebble rolls in my pocket.

Objects are infused by histories,

confine us to the past.

On the path under the eucalypts

leaves and bark find a place under my heels.

I lean against trunks, peel them like sunburn.

I write words in the bedroom air, drop them

in the centre of the floor,

carve effigies of his moods in bone.

I thread line through cicada wings,

hang them on pelmets,

put bird feathers on window sills,

arrange them seaward.

My mind fills with smoke from his Indonesian cigarettes,

strands of it float to the ranges.

The leaf envelopes are in the bottom of my bag.

Spilling tea on my book, the water stretches

into the future.

Birds pick through crab claws, shells, aged glass.

Light reflects and I read it as a sign.

The blue gaps between the branches are water.

In the arbour, the ibises forage for food,

reveal the fleshy underside of wings.

Their feathers lean seaward

cicadas mute the trees with drone.

Sea grass covers the beach and birds pick

through jellyfish, clam shells.

Bottle shards refract.

On the horizon the tide shifts over islands.

The Last Weeks of the War, Istria 1945

1. Icici

The Germans tell her to get

into the jeep.

Holding on to its cold, dusty sides,

Sofia looks back at the steel-grey

Adriatic and her brother,

as the jeep lurches onto the road.

He holds the lunch she’s brought him

wrapped in a worn, cotton napkin

against his chest.

Standing next to Pepi, his girlfriend,

who has accompanied her there.

Sofia tightens her grip.

The Germans are taking

her to Fiume.

2. Fiume

The gaol door slams shut

as she looks at the toilet

in the corner and the old stone wall

facing her and the others,

all women. She is the youngest

in this group of forty. She fingers

the crucifix around her neck.

The cell smells

of human sweat and waste

but swallows swoop

into the courtyard

when the prisoners walk round

inside its walls once a day.

At midday after they soak

their bread with the remnants

of their watery soup,

the others stare at the serving

of pasta she gets in addition

because of her age.

For more food she lines up

with the adults to unpick rough,

burlap sacks in a musty room.

She’d hoped for meat. She gets

bread and jam.

3. Portorosa

The guard takes her by the arm,

out of the cell, and onto a truck

to sit among German soldiers

with tortoise-like helmets and rifles.

Non parlano italiano and

she doesn’t speak German.

They arrive at a hotel that

smells of lilacs and roses.

Flanked by two soldiers she pauses

in the lobby when she sees

the French windows and the honey-

coloured, parquet floor.

Sofia shares a velvet-draped room

with three other girls, and sees

the jade Adriatic from a small,

narrow balcony. No one talks.

Anyone could be a spy.

She dreams of her mother’s garden

in Valsantamarina.

She’s become a mula del FlaK

wears a blue uniform, goes to daily

lessons to learn German – Ich habe Angst

morse code – dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit

and to study the highways

of the air.

4. Pirano

She gets off the tram and something

makes her keep walking to the water’s edge.

This time she isn’t getting the tram

back to Portorosa.

A shoemaker with a limp asks her

where she is going, she tells him

she wants to get back to Fiume.

He points to his house in the lane.

She walks in that direction after he leaves

but then she hides and waits.

Hai visito la mula del FlaK?

He asks his wife when he returns.

There are no Germans.

Sofia comes out from her spot

under some stairs.

They’ll get her to a safe house.

5. Croc

Part of the letter to her mother reads

non sono coi tedeschi, sono in una casa.

The woman slips it into her shirt pocket

and promises to deliver it.

A few days later, some dirty, young men rush

past Sofia and into the cottage with news −

the Americans have liberated Trieste.

6. Abbazia

Sofia stands at the aquamarine

shore and can’t remember

how many trucks it took

to get from Croc

to Buie

to Trieste

to Fiume

to Abbazia,

or how much

bread and water

she had,

or how many

people she met

as she passed rasping vehicles

filled with partisans

or prisoners of war.

She knows

if she’s lucky

she only needs

one more ride.

Hunters and collectors

1. The core of the science

When the damp of the Even made it necessary to send my Plants and books on board I made a small excursion in order to shoot any thing I could meet with and found a large quantity of Quails, much resembling our English ones, of which I might have killd as many almost as I pleasd had I given my time up to it, but my business was to kill variety and not too many individuals of any one species. ~ Sir Joseph Banks, 3 May 1770, Botany Bay

To collect you have to

understand having.

To have: to own, to possess.

Nearness can be relied on.

To collect you have to

understand knowing.

To know: to acquaint, to experience.

What can be named, can outgrow fear.

To collect you have to

understand regeneration.

To regenerate: to renew, to rebirth.

Life ignites through endings.

2. Banksia serrata

Our collection of Plants was now grown so immensly large that it was necessary that some extrordinary care should be taken of them least they should spoil in the books. I therefore devoted this day to that business and carried all the drying paper, near 200 Quires of which the larger part was full, ashore and spreading them upon a sail in the sun kept them in this manner exposd the whole day, often turning them and sometimes turning the Quires in which were plants inside out. ~ Sir Joseph Banks, 3 May 1770, Botany Bay

The sailmaker gives Banks and

Parkinson a sceptical look

as a group of sailors spreads a perfectly good piece

of canvas on the sand.

Banks arranges the specimen-filled

paper on the sail

and throughout the day

walks round and between the rows

touching, checking, considering

with the mien of a midwife.

Parkinson picks up a plant

found nearby,

feels the woody stem, the serrated leaves

that scratch the skin.

And the yellowy spike, the flower?

A brush,

a vase cleaner,

not a relative of the rose.

Parkinson knows nothing of the plant’s other secrets −

not destroyed by fire

the spike matures into the seed cone

then opens with the heat of flames.

3. King parrots

One of our midshipmen stragling by himself a long way from any one else met by accident with a very old man and woman and some children: they were setting under a tree and neither party saw the other till they were close together. ~ Sir Joseph Banks, 4 May 1770, Botany Bay

He bends over and brushes the grass

from his boots,

his calico sack filled with parrots

slips from his shoulder.

He looks up.

An old woman

motions the children

to her side. She is quite

naked.

He has come too far.

Canoes scrape

against rocks that jut from wet

sand like heads.

‘Indians’ slam stone knives

into oysters clamped

to boulders.

The midshipman feels cold,

takes the dead birds

from the sack,

and sets them

at the woman’s feet.

The blood-stained feathers

touch her skin.

He steps back into the scrub.

Variations in travel

1. Before my flight you left lilies in my study

In full bloom they strutted through the room and seduced the postcards from my wall. The Chinese Empress fell first – the scent of the Orient filling her mind with jade beads and the gossip of dragons. The tangerine pollen stained her hands. She lay across the dictionary for weeks and found the ‘l’ in love is used twice in luckless. Your apologies haunt the airport lounges and tarmac boardings. But Rome grips me. The god, Janus, looks ahead and behind. Your grand gestures fall short of small kindnesses. In the distant piazza an old woman showers birds with crumbs.

2. Summer found me on a night train somewhere between Spain and France

The couchette was packed with retirees. I couldn’t sleep. There was a man in the compartment. I realised then I believed in the segregation of the sexes and spent the night on a bed of metallic thuds. Before daylight only the elderly had risen and gathered along the corridor, waiting, patient as migrating penguins. I was still dressing and was last off the train. The Parisian police questioned me and searched my shoulder bag for drugs. They held up a dirty towel, underwear, a souvenir from Barcelona.. At the station I bought a croissant to clear the bone in my throat.

3. Valley mists uncovered the shoulders of mountains

That winter at the Hydro Majestic I worked for the old spinster who kept her Pekingese in a playpen next to her desk. She smelled of cheese. At night you and I talked of aliens and flying saucers. I went to work at the country club where the morning cook tapped his fingers on tables and the manager steadied her day on a continuous glass of scotch. On one breakfast shift I heard the meows of a kitten. I climbed through the kitchen window and found a steel-grey mass peppered with flea eggs. Later I ran into the cook’s area to rescue burning toast. When he saw me all he could say was: Outta me kitchen. I left the country club, pet under my arm. It disappeared after a few days. Maybe with the flying saucers. And the only alien I saw was me in a cold mirror.

4. Looking over your shoulder

I think of those narrow streets in Kyoto where children led me to temple entrances and shrines. They were unafraid to speak with a stranger. I’d missed Basho’s grave but in the mountain temples I heard the wooden floorboards speak. My fascination with the language kept me walking backwards and forwards. The attendant stiffened then told me to stop. I didn’t have enough words to explain that the timber was talking. Near one rock garden was written: I only learn to be content. You look frightened when I tell you I don’t know anything anymore.

5. April, and I’m uncontactable at the cabin

From the verges of the road, the wallabies thud into the scrub past a tree still decorated with silver Christmas tinsel. The asphalt is smeared with fur and dark pink flesh. A sky is stretched and pasted onto blue. The day meanders through pages and pages of books into a night where grey light fidgets with my thoughts. Nine notes from Gymnopédie No.1 turn over in my head and insomnia writes this poem in the dark. Last summer, facing west before dusk, I waited for the bands of light to slip along the tree bark and fall to the forest floor. They diffused, then gathered, forming a core that rose as gold mist.

Uncle Pepi

The following poem, Uncle Pepi was published in Quadrant.

The sound of twigs breaking along the path out the back alerts him that there’s something wrong. This time the trap door in his mother’s cellar doesn’t help him,

he’s at his aunt’s chopping firewood. A German soldier takes him by each arm. They drive him to Icici to work for them. In gestures more than talk, he tries to explain

that he’s not an electrician but it’s no good and one of them points his gun muzzle at the aerial searchlight that won’t work. Pepi understands that he has to do a good job.

He begins fidgeting with the button on his shirt as he looks at a cow that grazes daily along the roadside. He’s worried and consoles himself with the thought that at

least his sister and girlfriend will bring him lunch. He figures out how the contraption works and after two failed attempts at getting a spare part from Fiume and

Trieste, where they send him in a jeep filled with young soldiers and machine guns, the Germans try Torino then finally Berlin. With the spare part in place, Pepi asks for

oil and when he goes to get the bucket, it’s empty. In a sweat, he looks round and sees the cow nearby licking its lips. The oil is smeared on her snout and ears. He

rushes to the captain, says moo moo and mimes the cow lapping. Three of the soldiers wrestle the cow down and the captain takes a knife from his belt, and slits the

animal’s belly. It jolts as if electrocuted, blood and oil ooze onto the grass. The smell of guts makes Pepi gag. The captain smiles and nods, then orders another bucket of

oil. Pepi gets back to work muttering a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary. Drawing breath, he flicks the switch and the light beam appears.

Two photographs: Notes

The following poem, Two photographs: notes, was broadcast by PoeticA, ABC radio in 2011 National Poetry Week, 3 September.

1. Immovable Feast

The table laden as in a Seicento painting

but no exotic oranges or plumed pheasants on silver trays.

This display was more mundane:

roast chicken, vegetables, bread and compulsory cake

and mother would slide in the plastic, floral centrepiece.

We were also arranged

but round the table,

hair and clothes inspected.

She would direct us to face the camera

and, of course, smile

looking out to the ones that were left behind

see, see, better than in the old country.

2. Second Row

That’s me, in the second row with the unfashionable hair,

dreaming of being like them: tuckshop money,

sleepover parties, make up, magazines on how to talk to boys.

I went to the swim club only once and flapped like a wet moth.

That’s Margaret Mary, in the last row. The one with the long hair.

The friend who always praised herself and her family.

She told me not to say anything but

I hadn’t noticed her brother’s sunken chest.

One day I gave her a note for Geoffrey from Marist Brothers.

She returned with the news that before he read it,

he took it by the corner and said let the grease drip off.

I said nothing about him saying it or her telling me.

Nothing. Mother still tells me she regrets

not putting an extra ‘s’ in my name.

As if Rosanna wasn’t different enough.

Mediterranean mosaic

Robert Lowell is a poet who made an impression on me. Here I reference back to one of his poems.

Today neither Mother’s story

nor Lowell’s ‘Sailing Home from Rapallo’

brings the azure

of the Gulf of Genoa to mind.

I remember squatting on a balcony floor,

a doll under my arm, as my fingers

trace the grout slowly.

A circle of vermillion flares into petals

of yellow and white. These coloured tesserae,

a contrast to the dull sea of roof tiles below.

A train rattles in the distance and then Rapallo

fades from my memory.

Mother tells me Zio and Zia lived

in a small attic near the centre. Adamo

zigzagged the streets, delivering meat

door-to-door on a bicycle.

When we visited, I called for Daria

as I clambered up the steps of the tenement,

holding Mother’s hand.

She concludes

the balcony was the best thing

about the place.

Memory is made of fragments or perhaps

lies in the interstices?

But I try to make meaning of the pieces,

and rack through tile shards in this half-light of doubt.

Banks’ Tattoo

Now do I wish that our freinds in England could by the assistance of some magical spying glass take a peep at our situation: Dr Solander setts at the Cabbin table describing, myself at my Bureau Journalizing, between us hangs a large bunch of sea weed, upon the table lays the wood and barnacles; they would see that notwisthstanding our different occupations our lips move very often, and without being conjurors might guess that we were talking about what we should see upon the land which there is now no doubt we shall see very soon. ~ Sir Joseph Banks, 3^rd October 1769

Everything in the air and water matters.

The birds, the fish, the seaweed

and pieces of wood that bump against the hull.

You’ve left the Southern Seas

where the women mark their finger and toe joints

with the figure Z.

All the Tahitians cover their arms and legs

with crescents, circles and squares.

Cook records the latitude and longitude,

describing conditions as

‘Little wind and some times Calm.’

At the cabin table you examine

botanical specimens, talk

about the tattow on your arm.

Years later, Charles Davy asks

you in a letter:

‘I should be so much obliged to you

for an exact copy of the characters

stain’d upon your arm.’

No one has found your reply.

What’s left on your skin after the fragrance

of coconut oil and a woman’s breath

merge with the night?

Did the priest design a pattern

for an adventurer ‘passing through’ or incise

a map of the stars to be read

under the Milky Way’s light?

Lines written after lunch

The last poem was anthologised and is a favourite.

1. I’ve thought of you since the first days of summer

Nightly, I watch the fan turn

against a white ceiling,

each rotation

moves the candle flame and

the soft wax forms beads

on my bedside table.

I want to end this day

still as a sun-wearied wall.

The ocean lies miles away.

2. Barefoot

I dreamed briefly this morning:

somewhere before a glimpse of foliage drizzled with

light, and somewhere before touching flight feathers,

I stepped out of my sandals on to soft grass near you.

The swallows on the wires brush against an afternoon

raw with mock orange, geranium leaves, and

the strange letters tattooed on the inside of your arm.