Tag Archives: imagination

Between home and the further world

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This poem, published as ‘Further, or Autumn Isolation 2020,’ has now been published in Text journal, special issue 58, The in/completeness of human experience.

Somewhere around early April we travelled down to our weekender to bring supplies to our daughter who was in quarantine there after returning from overseas. Coming out of the cocoon of home, I was almost surprised to see that the beautiful balmy world of autumn was still out there, patiently waiting for us, maybe wondering what we’d be like when we emerged and re-entered it.

Further

Isolation in Melbourne: April 2020

‘I love our house…It’s probably a bit of a dump to some or a castle to others, but for me it’s a light-filled container full of people I love.’ Sarah Watt[1]

The sanctity of this         marked out        space

this collective turning             inwards


 the quiet comfort of walls                        angle of stair

our bed    creaking    as we turn

ripening of garden figs in afternoon light or

voices   drifting down a corridor –


while     streaming away              like photons dissolving in air

the further world                    still lies

              bemused      and utterly beautiful

beneath a creamy sun  


its fields and stony

rises    streets and verandahs                    all tipped

skywards            and slipping

gently    from summer’s ferocious grip


waiting for us –      as though

through a frosted pane

              we had never really seen it before

rolling out its     carpets of recurrent green


never stood amongst the low     thrumming

of unfolding seasons      or travelled

its wide and gusting territories                 of shift

and hold             and shift

[1] Sarah Watt and William McInnnes, Worse Things Happen at Sea: Tales of life, love, family and the everyday beauty in between,’ Hatchette, 2011, p.244.

If you stop – and look carefully – what will you see?

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‘Woolsthorpe Manor,’ copyright Pauline Brightling 2012

1666. Bubonic plague devastates London and Isaac Newton retreats to his family home at Woolsthorpe Manor. Self-isolation, long months of being in close quarters, no external stimulus – just the quiet world around him and the rising, creative life of the mind. Quite a combination as it turned out.

What can you see, what new constellation of elements – as the noise and frenzy of the great world slows, as the quietness of garden, autumn sunlight, the passing of hours, comes inexorably into view?

First published in Plumwood Mountain, a poem from my second collection Unexpected Clearing (UWAP 2016) – certainly more prescient than I could have known.

What Isaac Newton Saw

At Woolsthorpe Manor,

his childhood home,

the famous apple tree –

                     or perhaps its latter-day descendent,

a gracious Maid of Kent –

still droops its gnarled arms toward the

clottedness of earth,

giving up its wormed and floury fruit to the grass,

to the possibilities of turbulent

and muddy transformation:

Outwitting the plague, he sat for seasons in his quiet house,

its losses and constraints,

the drabness of its close routines;

almost a poet,

he watched

with such stillness and

openness

and restlessness –

the quiet world unfolding in his garden;

an ordinary miracle that needs a different eye to see it,

           a new tilt of the head, or sudden mood of

equanimity that allows leaves to rustle,

branches to brush the lawn,

a bird to move discretely and even

          try out some autumnal singing –

each thing 

sifting into

place,

judged   or

unjudged:

until an apple simply

 falls –

a muscular movement of energy,

and chance –

and a new constellation of elements

spins

shimmering

into view.

For more on Isaac Newton in the time of plague, see the UK National Trust: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/woolsthorpe-manor/features/year-of-wonders