DENISE O'HAGAN - POEMS

Denise is an editor by trade. Born in Italy, she studied in the UK and emigrated to Australia, where she works in publishing. Her poems are published in New Reader Magazine, Other Terrain Journal, Literary Yard, Poet’s Corner/InDaily, and have been shortlisted for the Robert Graves Poetry Prize and the ACU Poetry Prize (2018), and commended in the latter. Website: https://blackquillpress.com/

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Fifty-five days
​

​We shrugged at bomb scares at school
Locked our doors, watched our bags and our steps
And skirted any lone bag on a bench.
These were the years of lead, after all.
The violence that edged things was rising
And life was getting a ragged quality to it.
The heart was falling out of the city
Its famous walls bulged with sanctioned corruption
Handshakes and deals that never happened.
 
So when a famous politician was kidnapped
And held hostage for fifty-five days,
We’d run out of shock, so to speak.
Yet his heavy-lidded resignation dragged at our hearts
As a mugshot released grainy proof that he was, still, alive
And his letters of appeal went public.
‘In truth,’ he wrote, ‘I feel a little abandoned…’
 
The government, curiously, was implacable:
Its refusal – this time! – to negotiate for one of their own
Was cold and hard as marble.
Not the supplications of family and friends
Nor the offer of papal intervention
Stemmed the inevitable, blossoming horror.
 
To the wail of sirens and a thickening crowd
His bloody, bullet-studded body was found
Chained and crumpled in the boot of a Renault
And dumped in the centre of Rome.
The symbolism was callously clear:
A sacrifice had been laid at a political altar
But by whom?
 
Then was the time of recriminations and allegations
Of tip-offs unfollowed and other inexplicable revelations
Strikes, demonstrations, and calls for resignations
Spawning ever more accusations
Which clung like mist to the men in black suits
And shadowed the stretching of the years ahead.
 

Boston uncommon
​

​Over the grills in Boston Common
As the evening turns to night
Dark figures drift into view
Warming themselves in belches of steam
That arise, as groggy and insubstantial
As vapours from Hell.
 
Hoarse cries, red-rimmed eyes
Gloves clutching at brown paper bags
Like holy relics.
Ignoring the averted eyes
And the judicious stepping aside
Of the lacquered mainstream
These misfits of society, these malcontents
Blot out their demons and
Soak away their lives
In alcohol.
 
The last commuter has long since gone
When these lumped, slumped figures
Alternative versions of our darker selves
Subdued at last, lie down
Blanketed, beanied and scarved
Arms crossed over, heads bowed
Wrapped in plastic like giant plasters
Suturing the city’s most intimate wounds.
 
A trolley-ride away
In the salubrious salons of the well-to-do
Where money and class work hand-in-glove
The high-court judge, the stockbroker and the policy-maker
Uncoil themselves from their cases, spreadsheets and drafts
And tend, at last, to their own needs.
Drunk on pride and vintage sherry
They lick their lips, lock their doors
Flick off their chandeliers
Pad across mahogany floors
to retire at last to bed
and (with the help of a pill, perhaps)
to a clear, untroubled sleep.
 

Someone else’s morning 
​

​The sun bores down
On a rectangle of synthetic green:
An inner-city playground.
 
The empty swing hangs immobile
Its knotted metal chains glinting
Its mottled wooden seat waiting.
 
It is one of the passed-over places
An oasis of discomfort, cut out from shade
Of the surrounding canopy of trees.
 
A little boy plays alone
Throwing a twig high into the sky
It does not come down again.
 
Under the trees, a man’s rough call
Blurry with drink and loneliness
Lingers in the hot air.
 
Paper bags, like big brown leaves,
Drift stained and empty along the pavement
Shored up by the playground railings.
 
‘Mama, look!’ The boy has made a face
Out of sticks, cigarette ends for his eyes
His delight is palpable.
 
The young woman in the laneway
Walks across, slowly, each step an effort
Her arms, so thin, reach out to him.
 
I cannot stand and watch this, I cannot stay
I tuck my son into his stroller and turn away.
 
(Written in King’s Cross, an inner-city suburb of Sydney where the bohemian lifestyle it is known for lies like the thinnest of blankets over the deeper problems of homelessness, addiction and crime.)
 

What was
​

​In the kitchen I stand
Tracksuit-clad and blinking
As the click of the front door shuts
The sounds of the day away.
 
I snuff the gas
And the subterranean gurgling fades to naught
As, like a latter-day suburban witch
Leaning over her latter-day potion
I raise the lid of my coffee pot
Damp my fingers in the steam
And enact the tri-part ritual:
Close, lift, and ever so gently pour
A rich and gleaming rope
Of boiling black memoried liquid
Bearing the imprint of half a century of pourings
Into my cup.
 
Reverently I raise it to my lips
And drink of another old high-ceilinged kitchen
Zig-zagged by light cutting in through the shutters
Half-closed against the sun from the run-around balcony
With its fluttering of uneven ghosts on the line
Which spoke of countless bendings and stretchings
As our mothers down the generations casually
Pegged our lives out there on the washing line:
All this inherent in that single sip.
 
I dip my toast in coffee, smile
And, fortified, swallow away nostalgia
and am, for now, grateful for what was.
 
 

​A glut of words

​On any given day
There is a glut of words around me
On doorways, streets and signs
Informing, instructing, warning
On labels, shops and cars
Coaxing, cajoling, luring
In restaurants and bars
The many-tentacled monster
of modern communication
Pressing in around me,
Assertive and insistent
Audacious and capricious
oppressing and compressing me
Sometimes, they almost make me choke.
 
But then there are others
The passed over or forgotten words
Scrawled on beggars’ placards
The bewildered words
Whispered away in the slipstream of time
Crumpled thoughts in a lover’s thrown-away note
Fragments of people’s conversations
Caught in the wind on a street corner.
 
Must it be like this?
Words should be held like little gems
Precious-like
In the soft cup of a child’s hand
And picked out tenderly, one by one
So we can slip into the lining of situations
And see them from the inside.