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Poem: Adelaide

In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Mike Ladd shares a poem from his eclectic new collection of writing called ‘Invisible Mending’.

Aug 31, 2016, updated Aug 31, 2016

Adelaide

You old quincunx.
Colonel Light playing tic tac toe
on the Kaurna’s pages,
that little brownsnake of a river
winding through its parklands frame.

Over your eastern stairs the sun appears,
filtering through skylights,
the footfall echo of your arcades,
to end with a long bath in the west –
your curve of beaches
which are summer’s collective.

Clever, pretty, but lacking confidence,
exposed here on your plain.
We always have to talk you up,
get your festival clothes on.

I like you best in November
when you spill buckets of jacaranda,
April too, when the slow light cools
into shouts in the stadia.
Even now, after a week of 40 degrees –
it’s raining at last,
upstairs at the Exeter I can hear
chuckles in the gutters
and applause from the rooftops.
Beyond the brown haze of your suburbs
we smell desert,
so we love to see the water run.

Adelaide – heimat of sandstone Terraces,
gargoyles, lacunae, suffocations.
Once I thought you were too small,
but after all these years we fit each other:
here in front of Bonython Hall,
my first memory – a pantomime giant
came down through the floodlit trees
chasing Jack and his golden harp.

Place is voice as much as view:
“Legs like Payneham Road.”
“A pash at Windy Point” –
It’s better up there than Los Angeles,
that hot glitter, all the way to the Gulf.

Mike Ladd poetryMike Ladd began reading his poems at Friendly Street and seeing them appear in local and national publications at the age of 17. His first collection, The Crack in the Crib, was published in 1984, and was followed by eight more collections of poetry and prose. He was the editor of ABC Radio National’s Poetica series for 18 years, and currently works for Radio National’s features and documentary unit. He is a poetry mentor, judge and reviewer, and along with his partner, artist Cathy Brooks, has run projects putting poems on street signs as public art.

His new book, Invisible Mending (Wakefield Press 2016), includes essays, memoirs, short stories and poetry, ranging from family intimacies, to connection and disconnection in the Australian community, and environmental damage and repair. Parts of Invisible Mending were written at an artist’s residency in Malaysia, and while travelling in South America. Selections from it have appeared in literary publications and newspapers in Australia, the UK and US. More about Invisible Mending can be found here.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.
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