Jeffrey Harpeng
Anzac Day Dawning – 2020
A balm of numbness, so roll the days. All the world is in waiting for what no one can see. A new uncertainty endlessly talks about death that we have pushed away. Our hurry has been anaesthetised. For some the still itself seems like the very whisper of death, a hushed miasmic breath, if breath and death can be spoken of in the same breath.
Some say these times are a trial, and there is purpose in a trial. That seems a frayed thread when nature is considered. I find a statement that trails off in my head, “If you are breathing, then . . .”
I sleep less. As soon as I wake words crowd out rest. I go to the computer and am paused by a nostalgia that this would be more real if I could dip a quill in ink and scratch at parchment, or tap away at my little old Olivetti. The ache for a different physics, for effort in my hands, makes me listen!
someone is talking
and a magpie lark
in the bloodwood
outside my window says –
is this what the crows also say?
April 25th I am woken by a plane lumbering over, as with cargo to a battlefront. Two months ago it would not have woken me. The sun is not yet risen from its journey through the underworld of dream. I slip on my dressing gown and go out into the drive.
Since the grumbling murmur of traffic has been hushed, the birds have found fuller voice, a ceremony of praise in many languages, the call and response fainter in a distance I cannot usually hear. It sounds like “I am, I am, I am!”
five, forty five
a grey beginning – flying
foxes made of night
wing to their resting – what
is home – they cluster, chatter
Not on any morning since the cacophony of Gallipoli has the wreath of quiet covered our cities so profoundly.
Harry who is Bob
and our Mishka like a cat
rattle the morning
door to go – they saunter
as if that was a way of saying
The people from the house across the road come out, accompanied by their dog, full of good mannered excitement for his walk. My daughter comes out and turns on the car radio. A distant trumpeter heralds with considered notes the coming of the sun, still approaching. Grumbling from sleep another neighbour with her children comes out to her drive. The trumpeter’s last note fades to a sound like trees rustling. Or is that the pebbled shush of the tide at Gallipoli?
How long is a minute, or two in a lifetime? How long is a minute in the time of the virus, how long for those suffering, how long the last minute of life? We are silent for those who have died. We are separated for the sake of those who might die. How sudden or protracted the last minute of any life?
In that hush the trumpeter takes breath and sounds off again. Each note quivers like perhaps . . . like a certainty that in time we all forget.
two warbirds – ghost sounds of a past war with us still drone over like nostalgia for death, ever gathering
About the Author
Jeffrey Harpeng is an erratic autodidact, a fossicker in the ocean of notions.