rjberry@fbm.upm.edu.my 

HEARTLAND

Bamboos creak and shiver
The air hot gooey molasses.

A pendulous ceiling of cloud swings,
Fat with thunder.
Then inexorably, it rains. 

Our river creeps sluggishly round broad bends
Through sweat soaked jungle
That is the dwelling of ghosts,

Running into the dreaming eyes of village elders
In silence, heat

Dredging the bones of history.

Finally its muddy vein works at
A swathe of festering mangrove,
Before tussling the sea.

Flies, cockroaches,
Outrageous reeking flowers,
Mist drawn over our faces
Like ghosts in the gray daylight

Our craft a skimming pebble
On the roaring river,
Moving downstream. Leaving

For the child loud edges of the ocean
For the tide crying wistfully at inevitable loss,
For a shore clean scavenged by 
tentacles of sea.

SETTLEMENT

The tide thunders
and lays down like broken courage. 

Shingle is stained with seaweed,
Fantastic sea-cut driftwood,
Pulpy matter of summer picnics,
A decayed seabird.

Witness the rusting industry of fishermen
Who smoke in the gossip of snugs now.
I smell them reminisce, 

These municipal monuments
That trawl in a lingering tourist at nightfall.

See the woman wrapped in fog 
Who waits for the cry of the town clock,
For the bus to the bright centre of things. 

Four generations ago
Her ancestors edged along the blustery vein of this harbour
Which was so like, but not home.

Bogged to their waists in tussock, swamp, wilderness,
They struck at our land. The autumn sunshine was chill.
We bear grudges.

A goods wagon grinds across the points, 
Plunges into the cutting behind First Church

As the iron mandibles of the container hoist
Cast their insect shadow into Main Street.

At the breakwater the Southern Ocean rumbles.
Headlands shove at a swell
Which remembers no history.

The town stills. But we stir,
The dispossessed chiefs and masters, 
Gruff, like thistles in the wind.

STORIES

The stories you told me
The ceiling fan slowly turning shadows
To the edge of time
The words' magic swelling like a flood

Voices I knew
Filled with loyalties of blood, clan,
Bitter with the tang of old dispossessions,
Fanning the past's crackling ashes.

In my house by the sea
Lines break across this page like surf.

The swell rocks lost buoys
Which toll like the tongues of memory.

As gulls skate over the reef
Screaming their own histories

I am sharpening armfuls of the past,
Witching the words.

CAPITAL

Late leaves
eddy,
Round the bird-stained plinth
Of a monumental elder,
Bronze shoulders set
To the frigid wind.

Graveyard sky
Lanced by steeples,
Churches ringed with headstones
Crooked as broken teeth.

A watercolour sun is
washing into the mute still river

Then rain,
Pouring off neat Georgian buildings
Lashes the cobbles of Main Street.

BAY

Sea. A red buoy rolls on the placid tide
Like a Christmas bauble,
A trawler working over the horizon

Into infinity. 

Goats browse on the beach,
Passing over cracked plastic containers,
Discarded fishing net, rubbery seaweed
With the certainty of wisdom.
Surf licks after their hooves,

Strong undertow clawing the sand
Where gulls feud over a reeking crab.

To the East,
Snake Island is a venomous full stop
On a sea plated silver.

© All Copyright, Dr. Robert James Berry.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.