Stanzas – by Jo Gardiner

ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY

Poetry is the vapour trail of lived experience.

                         —John Freeman

If you talk about tomorrow, they say,
the rats in the ceiling will laugh, so speak
only of this one day when morning drops
its bright curtain across the window,

                       *

and the yellow walls watch you stir
and shake birds and leaves from your hair.
Each room entered builds a desire
for the next—now a blue room where

                       *

light tumbles through water and slips
from your grasp like soap. Now
you’re a shadow pausing at the top
of the stairs listening to the clatter

                       *

of cutlery, and catching the smoky scent
of the tea you drink in the glass room
that lingers over the garden, the poplar
trailing seed in white dreadlocks.

                       *

A king parrot hurtles past like a beating
heart thrown headlong into its wild
future. Later, at your desk by the lime
green wall, the light dims and the world

                       *

ends before the sun appears again
and the bowerbird that dimmed
the day is long gone. It was here
you learned to love the longitude

                       *

and latitude of these rooms: how
you were once elsewhere, now here
in your heartland, and with room to be.
In the red glow of the lamp at day’s end,

                       *

the house shifts and speaks before it comes
to rest, and all its rooms collapse into dusk.

▼

Image: Vidar Nordli Mathisen - Unsplash

---

If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.