Away.

I’m on holiday. I’ve gone away. To Broome, as it happens. A very long way away. Well over 2300 kilometres. On the plane it took 2½ hours to fly from Perth. This a journey within one state and not even from one extremity to the other. Like I said, a long way away.

Why do we do this? Why travel great distances to some other place from where we normally live? Many reasons. Often more than one applies to a particular situation. As it does this time. I’ve come away to have some respite, a change from the usual. To relax without the burden of the everyday urgency of living which always seems so present in our normal biding. In addition, spending time with loved relations, my brother-in-law and his wife. So, definitely a complexity of reasons.

Being away implies some notion of a base, somewhere that isn’t away. Although I’ve spent around two thirds of my life mostly in various locations around the city of Perth, it doesn’t yet feel like my home. But if you ask me where that would be, I would still be hard up for an answer.  Most people unhesitatingly ascribe a city, a town, a suburb, as their home. Not me. I was born in Sydney. I lived in the city for the first three years of my life and then the next eleven within a radius of less than 100 kms. That was a long time ago.  Since then I’ve only visited the city for brief periods. Those early years and the collection of short subsequent visits are not enough for Sydney to qualify as my home. And if that doesn’t count, nowhere else is going to fare any better.

But I’m not stateless. I’m still in the country in which I was born. I have an unequivocal right to go on  living here, in Australia. Whether I can specify somewhere in the country as my home town or not is irrelevant to the political fact that Australia counts officially as my home. I have somewhere to live. I’m not threatened by anything more than politicians who want me to believe they’re always acting in my best interests, and business people who assure me “your call is important to us”.

According to an item on SBS News this evening, there are 15 million refugees in the world right now. People who are away. People who are not at home. People who no longer have a home. Or if they can identify a place which they call home, they cannot live there, cannot go back there. These are people who are away not from choice but because they’ve been driven from their homes by war, murder, rape, torture, starvation, terrorism, or some other hideous provocation from a long list of possibilities.

In the meantime I live in a country in which I can freely choose to go away. I also live in a country whose politicians — there’s no distinction in this case between government and opposition members — pretend that we are somehow seriously threatened by a few hundred refugees , virtually all of them bona fide, who arrive on our shores, or at least in our territories, by boat. These illegal immigrants, so-called boat people, who have come away in order to save their lives, are apparently a dire danger whereas the thousands who come by air and overstay their visitor visas pose no problem.

I would like to extend the hospitality of my home, my country Australia, to these homeless people, these people who have come away from their forbidding homelands . But my government, those politicians elected to represent my wishes and to act on them, has chosen to ignore me and deny any welcome to this particular category of refugees. And I cannot get away from this despicable policy and its inhumane application. Even if I go away from the country, which, as I’ve already said,  I can freely choose to do, I cannot get away from the shame. There is nowhere away from this.

 

IMMIGRANT

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

Soon it will lie beyond memory.

 

I came here on that vagrant boat,

Though I would as gladly come

On the back of a great bird in the sky,

Or carried in a chariot of the gods.

 

On this voyage there was no fantasy,

Only a mundane and miserable passage,

Dragged across wilful currents and tides;

I should not have hoped for more.

 

Yet I dreamt of a different journey,

And for a time the dream was real,

Fragments remain, vaguely calling me;

I still hope, long for them to be true.

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

But I have come to stay.

Ruari Jack Hughes

Finished!

There hasn’t been much activity here for a few weeks. For very good reason. The writing effort has been directed full-time to finishing the novel. A few days ago the last chapter was written. Not actually the last chapter of the novel but the final one created. Yesterday , after a few formatting issues, the manuscript went off to reviewers. Now I sit and wait for their raves or their condemnations. Seriously hoping for the former.

Because when I say ‘Finished!’, it doesn’t really mean finished, does it? What writer, what artist in any field, ever truly feels that the work is finished, that it cannot be made better, that they have achieved perfection, a final statement that cannot in any way be added to or improved?

We’re accustomed to the idea that new editions of non-fictional writing will most likely have revisions and updates, but I wonder how many readers are aware that fictional works are also frequently revised in new editions? Some writers can’t resist tinkering with their work. Joseph Conrad was notorious for making changes in every new printing of his novels. We have multiple versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Hollywood is forever remaking successful movies. Was there really a need to redo “The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo”?

Beyond the realm of writing and other artistic endeavour there are perhaps more profound indications that no creative artist is ever finally satisfied with their work. We’ve all heard the joke about how God made Eve because he wasn’t quite happy with the first model, Adam. More significantly, He must have felt something was wrong with His creation that it needed Him to send Jesus to fix it up.

Finished? No, I don’t think so. Only for certain values of the word. But not ultimately. There must come a point where we arrive and say enough is enough, already. Some moment when we stop and decide that this is as good as it gets — in my world at least.

 

Enough for the Day

His hand opened.

In it he discovered

Patterns of lines,

Description of what he could make,

Image of himself.

So why not?

Let me make a being,

A life to inhabit a world,

Someone like me,

But not me.

The grid lines in his palm

Sorted into a man.

But it was not enough,

Not all there could be.

He closed his fist.

Then, opening it again,

He found what he needed.

Now he had both,

A man and a woman.

It was enough.

What he had

Was enough.

 

Ruari Jack Hughes

 

 

Versifying

 

Let’s see about writing a poem. What first? An idea, something to write about. I’ll check my list of possible titles/themes/ideas. OK, here’s one that looks likely, ‘specially since this posting is about making a poem.

Huge ball of poetry.

There’s my title; by implication it’s also my subject. So far, so good. What next? Something about a huge ball of poetry. Well, yes, but what? What is a huge ball of poetry? The answer probably lies inside. Inside the writing, I mean. Usually a piece of writing gradually says what it’s about as the words appear on the page, stretching out in a long string. I’m intrigued to see where the words are going and what will lie at the end of the string. That looks like a good image for a huge ball of poetry; a coiled up string, rolled around this way and that, over and over, strands crisscrossing, words touching each other which weren’t together in the sequence of the writing but are now tangled and twined so that coming on one, we’re falling over another which wasn’t originally tied to it at all. A bit like that last sentence which managed to go on for almost four lines, one thought leading to the next, then snaking back, a serpent trying to swallow its tail (or should that be tale?)

Have I got enough to make a poem? Well, I’ll start and see where we go.

 

… and this word

will be followed by that one and

then the next after it will be the one that’s meant

to follow it in some sort of agreement to keep sense and not

muck up the meaning of what the words together are supposed to be saying

so long as they’re in an order that is familiar but of course it doesn’t matter too much

since poetry can break the rules of grammar and even syntax in order to create a sense of

a feeling or the flight of the air through the winding paths of the forest or over the jumping

 waves of the sea or maybe around the flittering tails of a herd of wild horses galloping across

the steppe which stretches all the way from the coldness of the Arctic shore to the warm

lapping edge of  the great Caspian Sea where lived the ancestors of people

who some day would travel to that sunny sanctuary lying in the vast

southern ocean which somehow balances the continental

 land masses sitting on the top of the world instead of

being spread more evenly across

 the hemispheres…

Is this a poem? Let’s review what we’ve got. A huge ball of words all caught up together. Yet not too hard to follow those words along the line one after another. You may not be able to see at the beginning where those words are going be at the end, but that’s what good writing does, keeps you in suspense, at the same time gradually revealing more and more of what the writer wants to say — or at least what the writer finds himself saying (not quite the same thing when you think about it).

What else is there? Check for the usual criteria. It’s one continuous run-on line; it doesn’t have end rhyme; it’s without regular metre — though there are internal rhymes and a feeling of rhythm is present. Some may dismiss any claim that it’s verse. Others will insist this piece of writing — this huge ball of words — is emphatically a poem.

Enough! Let it be a poem or let it be just a jumble of words. For me, however, the words go somewhere, say something, and from the beginning of writing,  the beginning of poetry, its entire history, that’s been enough.

Ruari Jack Hughes

Bitter Was the Night

This is the night when you wash each other’s feet. The night when you remember the Passover. The night when  you share the hasty meal before the  deliverance from God’s wrath. This is the night when God struck down the first born of all living things, human and other animal life. This is the night when God’s son prayed and wept in the garden. The night when the others slept instead of keeping vigil. This is the night of betrayal. This is the night of premonition  of horror.

So go to your beds to sleepy rest. But don’t dream. Don’t let your memories invade your unconsciousness. Turn off your minds to the call to stand vigil. I’ll join you. I’ll wait for the cock crow and wonder if, in my sleep, I’ve been guilty of three times of denial. I’ll wake certain that it happened. Somewhere, sometime, I know that I turned my back, didn’t listen to the plea, shrugged off the need. Tomorrow I’ll be there in the church, sorrowful for the death of my God. Repeating the prayers of lamentation and commiseration. An onlooker, not a true participant in  the passion. Not yet. Maybe next year.

Happy Easter!

 

barAbbas

And did you do anything

When you were crying out

Your injustices, your complaints

Against the occupying forces?

 

Wasn’t it all just an excuse

To pillage the villages,

To steal a few girls,

Pretending you were a freedom fighter?

 

Sure, the king turned a blind eye

To your shenanigans,

It suited him to let you

Annoy the foreigners, didn’t it?

 

When you were rampaging

Across the weary land,

There was another calling for change,

Did you never hear him?

 

While you were murdering and tearing,

Marauding through the hills,

He was healing and mending,

Did you not cross paths?

 

You and your ragamuffin band

Were little more than a nuisance,

You couldn’t think you mattered,

Or were you so deluded?

 

What did you think

When you were chosen by the mob,

That the governor had a good

Sense of your worthiness?

 

Not even a political prisoner,

You were just in the right place

At the right time,

Were you destined or merely lucky?

 

People are forever fickle,

They didn’t care a fig for you,

They just wanted the other one dead,

Was it possible you didn’t get that?

 

If you thought the crowds were cheering

Because you had been released,

You surely didn’t understand the situation

Or did it just not matter?

 

Like the governor washing his hands,

You wandered into the story,

He didn’t know what he was doing,

Did you have any better idea?

 

In the end, they say

That even the man’s god abandoned him,

Anyway that’s what I heard,

Was that really right?

 

In any case, how could you walk from prison,

Right past that innocent man

As if you had that right,

When you had no right?

 

Then they killed him, above a rubbish tip,

While you quickly got out of town,

While you got to live

What more did you do, did you?

 Ruari Jack Hughes