ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

★ ★ ★ ★

SEAMUS KIRKPATRICK

4 Poems For My Girlfriend (And One More)

I experienced a European winter once when I was 16. I spent six weeks in Germany as part of a language scholarship and I still have vivid recollections of my trip and of the season.

We don’t have winter in Australia. Not like Europe does.
We particularly don’t have winter in Queensland—where I was born and where I now live.

It does get cold in Queensland, some areas it can get to below freezing. But we live in complete denial of the season.

Our traditional housing design which we call a “Queenslander” is one of the most poorly-designed houses ever. A Queenslander is high, airy, wooden and often raised on stumps to avoid summer flooding. So in winter they are leaky and exposed, and being inside feels the same as being outside. I have gone to sleep wearing four layers of clothing with a beanie on my head and slept under three layers of bedding. And I was probably still a bit cold. (I would like to add that in summer Queenslanders are still rubbish. No air flows through them unless they are built in a paddock on a hill. They become extraordinarily hot very quickly and living in them can be like living in a sauna.)

Summer (October to March) is when we feel most Australian. We can go swimming and play cricket. We can walk in the evening and our grocery stores are full of mangoes (real ones, not like you have them in Europe) and stone fruit.

We have never developed a winter culture here because winter is an imposition. “Outside” is unavoidable in Australia. When kids are loud we send them “Outside!”. We lament television and computer games because it takes us away from “Outside”. Social events are as often outdoors as indoors and we have nearly the highest rate of skin cancer in the world because an Australian childhood is spent in baking, brutal sun and an Australian adulthood is spent wishing you could be outside in the baking, brutal sun. (Though an adult Australian might desire to be less active outdoors then they were in their youth, they would prefer to fish or drink rather than run around collecting bindis in their bare feet).

But rising global temperatures are changing everything. Our winters are becoming milder and we are beginning to experience heat waves that kill old people and children. Storms are becoming wildly destructive and dangerous events. Dangerous sea creatures are migrating and coming south. Our carbon usage is amongst the highest per capita in the world—we live in huge, largely air-conditioned houses (and we like it COLD(?!))—we have an obsession with cars (Mad Max was actually a documentary) – and we live so physically far apart from each other that travelling on our wildly ineffective public transport systems is inefficient to the point of useless.

The changes in the weather aren’t going to stop.

Summer is slowly becoming something to be feared and endured (this summer was shocking). How will this affect our culture? I don’t know. However, I do know that right now I would choose an Australian summer over any season in any part of the world. Perhaps it’s parochialism but I truly love our summer. I love the feel of my skin baking, of walking through wet air, the grey cool morning and the sound of an afternoon storm on the tin roof of the Queenslander I live in. I hate the winter. It’s cold and dead and it’s opposed to almost everything that I feel it is to be alive.

This is what informed the 4 poems (and one more) below. Written by a boy trying to make his Europe-living girl homesick. I tried to combine my impressions of a European winter with my love of the Australian summer. The poems are a trifle unfair. I don’t care. Winter sucks.

(Actually I massively enjoyed my one European winter—but trust me, you’d rather be here).

1.

You would be having a
lot of loud fun here.
Packed in the shade of the pub
while a hardy, drunken few
brave the afternoon sun
or the street.

All of us pissed,
sweaty, stinking, singing
to songs we know and
shouting during those
we don’t.

The table is a brawl of
empty plates and
glasses of every shape.

He’s drinking light beer.
She’s drinking gin.
And he’s drinking champagne and
she’s drinking coke and rum.

We can hear a meat-eating
competition somewhere and
there is AC/DC and a
glass smashes and someone yells “Taxi!”
as I watch your morning
walk to work on my phone.

January in England is so alien.

Your blue sky seems crystal,
shrill and sharded, where
ours makes the windows
cry with condensation –
your air rushes you
along with a piercing
pinch and ours
holds you like a
gummy glove and the
trip to the beer garden
toilet is like a
swim and you arrive
back to the table drenched.

“Haha!” cries my Colombian friend
“See the Aussie sweat!”

Your breaths are taken with a
kick to the lungs and
ours are like a sweet
soporific draft that
medicates against the
racket and the
press of rancorous bodies.

An Australian January is a glorious thing indeed.

2.

Your breath is short and caught and
it seems to have knives in it.
I can hear your city behind you,
a far horizon hum foregrounded
by soft shuffles and quiet
creek like murmuring.

Winter sounds like a chilly,
steel desert and you seem to
slide on her skin, symbiotic mites
that never get in.

Here I am pinioned in an inescapable oven hug.
Generous to the point of smothering.

Every breath is a fist
down my throat,
fiery and choking, while
the finger down yours is
pointy and accusing.

My city is backgrounded by
the same combustion hums and
river burbles but there is a
rainbow of birdsong
outside my window
and the green grass sweats
with early morning rain and
the sun has already begun
her merciless flogging
within a few
shakes of
waking.

3.

We had a good time at the
New Year’s celebrations.

The old men moved like
fluid mountains as their
breath made walls of wave
and the children earnestly
mocked them as parents
beamed and chuckled.

The soup was fiery,
the food was an
insurmountable mountain
carried out in porcelain valleys
and the clear rice wine was
fierier still and burnt down to my
belly and up through my nose
and your uncle laughed so hard
he nearly threw up, tears
dancing like a joyful river
down his face as he
waved away the old women
and the children laughed
and dodged, their squeaky voices
like a cartoon forest,
shrill and piercing.

The neon signs that
guided us there were
illustrative and brash
and the shopfront was a
technicolour yawn of
bright entreaties and
welcomes.

The crackers were brittle
thunder and the lions,
arse shaking and manes like
circling clouds rose up in a
sweaty wall, six feet, ten feet,
twelve feet high they danced on
pillars of steel and the audience
grimaced with fingers in their
ears, eyes squinted against the
hammering sound of drums and
gongs and fireworks.

I thought of you
in winter silence
huddled around fire,
wrapped in wool,
belly full of heated citrus
and cinnamon red wine
and I wished that
you were here but
maybe next year,
maybe next year.

Maybe next year you can
drink fire with us in the
hot and senseless January
of the great island in the
south.

And we can show you
what a new year is all about.

4.

I have no patience for your winter –
A great frigid blanket, dead-
eyed and pastel brown and
Black and grey and dirty scummy
White

I have no desire to breath the
Air that snatches life from
Lung and freezes blood and
Steals the will to waltz and
Wail

I have no want to watch you
Purple nosed and eyes streaming
As you trudge through wet
White drifts that claw at your
Walk

I am terrified by a night
That goes on forever and a sun
That makes a worthless cameo while
The whole world holds it breath and
Waits

I want to lie with you on yellow burnt grass under fiery blue skies with a sun that hurls daggers at white skin and birds that scream bloody murder and waves that snatch and fauna that’s frightening amongst rednecks and racists and frustrated artists and good decent Christians and dullards and winners and flamboyant beauticians and losers and thick angry tubs of men and hard mouthed women and beautiful dancers and hard drinkers and survivors and survivors and survivors who wander the streets in the midday terror who complain about the weather but couldn’t imagine retreat into the shade

I’m not interested in your European winter.
Not when we could swim in the Australian summer breeze.

(And One More)

The sunset here is a brilliant pink gash
in a grey torpid sky.

I know that your sunrises are icy
mirror surfaced salmon

and diamond blue but they could
never have the passionate

violence of a western Queensland
sunset, the sky torn apart

with acres of red dust, land set adrift
by desert winds from

the sleeping heart of a bleeding
continent furious,

glorious, ragged, bellicose and torrid beyond
what less than songs

can hold.

Let this be your last January alone.
You seem to me

a tiny snowflake amongst many but
lost, a small participant

in great flurries that anonymously
pile in city streets against

doors and icily decorate windows
with chaotic cold

spider webs and soak through clothes,
frighten trees into a

death, beat fauna and flora to retreat
they have no

love for your snapping, sapping, bitter chill
and they wait for your

inevitable sleep.

Come back to your country!
It’s vibrant with green!

It misses you and dances
lonely through

long sticky nights and
coruscating days

of prancing waves and oven
hot breezes thick,

sodden with the screams of
bats, birds, the hum

of insects hidden under
plate sized leaves

and no breath is free from
the scent of barbecue

and sunscreen and beer.

This must be your last January alone.
Come back to your country

and please come back to me.