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Poem: Memories like a pack of cards tumbling

List poems go back to The Bible and Homer’s Iliad, and in this week’s Poet’s Corner Katherine Healy continues the tradition.

Oct 21, 2020, updated Oct 21, 2020

Memories like a pack of cards tumbling

in no particular order

A jade bangle engraved with a tiger and a rose.
The feeling of being tucked into bed with a brown rug.
A marcasite brooch with a teardrop pearl saying goodbye.
The new-born babies safely delivered into the arms of a mother.

A ticket stub to a high school theatre play.
The photo of hugging a teenaged sister taken in a photo booth.
The pleasure of making transcendent music in a choir.
The discovery of literature.

A Webster’s Dictionary.
A post card from Queensland with an incorrect name.
The soft toy from a great-grandmother.
A gold, sapphire and diamond ring.

The carrot cakes made in share houses.
An archaic blue dance card with boys’ names written on it.
The pain of infidelity.
The pounding in the chest when love or fear visited.

The time another body fitted mine best.
A sharing of shameful secrets and future plans.
The help that was immediate and unquestioning.
A four-year-old hand held while walking to kindergarten.

The confidence and capability of a daughter.
The rage at friends’ lives ending in early deaths.
The roaring of siblings’ old bikes in a dusty backyard.
A softening toward wisdom and forgiveness.

The letter signed off: Your loving servant. (Was
Mr. Darcy reincarnated?)
The body-shock of bad news learned at work.
A gratitude for all the risk, mystery and avalanches of feeling.
The knowledge of life as finite, but of stardust
as being limitless and golden.

Katherine Healy lives in the Adelaide Hills. She has worked in education, community health promotion and counselling. She holds a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University, and in 2018 was shortlisted for both the prestigious international Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the national Nillumbik Ekphrasis Award. Her poems have been published in ‘Australian Book Review’, ‘Anthology of Australian Poetry’, ‘Idiom 23,’ previously in InDaily’s ‘Poet’s Corner’, and in ‘MiNDFOOD’, of whose 2020 inaugural Poem of the Year Competition she was declared the winner last month. A collection of poetry and a novel are works in progress, and more about Katherine and her work can be found here.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.

 

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