Two Poems by Jennifer Kornberger
The first poem was the 2016 winner of the Tom Collins Prize and the second a commended entry in the same competition
Sisters, with cabbages
At twilight the cabbages
were still defending order
amidst the brawl of lantana
robust nubs rooted
in the sweating clay
that dyed our feet henna red
in those days
there was always a redness
following us, staining
the concrete and carpets
even our sheets blushed
a flesh colour.
We looked up into a darkness
without scent or colour
the stars spotless
in a thin skirt of haze
and we believed for some minutes
that a star was expanding,
growing towards us
that we would be caught up
in its old testament light
before our first boyfriends
pressed their hands
over our unripe breasts
we would be plucked
from our parents’ farm
but as the haze lifted
the star took its place
in the lesser mysteries
of a night sky
leaving us foot-maids
of the clotted earth,
the servants of brassica
knowing that our
miraculous nonage
was over
that we would enter
some greater mystery
and desiring a blessing
we crouched before the cabbages
to cup their sturdy
heads in our hands, receive
their sensible oracle
before we walked
the red slurry of that patch
in a widening mandala
away from our childhood.
Mirage
(i)
At 2pm it is forty-four degrees
and the notion of an outside
and an inside dissolves.
In this cataclysm of heat and light
the details of the landscape glaze
and our bodies become turbulent.
Boneless, we assemble
and re-assemble
as shimmering graphs
what measurement we represent
is unknown, all explanatory text
is blurred. Our flesh was an illusion
we endured with bouts
of stoicism, now we are watery
ladders or ziggurats,
pale indigo cities.
In these flickering minutes
we suffer temporary dismemberment
separate into greater and lesser desires
coalesce as vague promises
uncertain if, in the mingling
of our liquids, we will become
one temple.
(ii)
We are very landscape in potentia,
terrifying in our volcanism
Antarctic in our aloofness
suffocating in our tropical lushness
we are salt lake and peat bog
intemperate in our longing
we are red
and our shadows
are green.
The rapid heating and cooling
of our affections has created
this Fata Morgana.
We crave to be figures
in this landscape
where contrasts combust
into hope, opposites meet
in a glistening truce.
(iii)
The problem of distance
cannot be solved.
We can only gaze
and in the gazing
the horizon might shuffle
forward, the vanishing point
re-appear and a figure
walk towards us
someone, almost familiar,
made of mirrors and lakes
of pure reflection and water’s desire
to be upright.
Someone who walks
out of a fertile
and fleeting oasis
carrying water
from a distant future
offering it to us
to drink.