Two poems - takahē

Selectively mute ode

I’ve tried so often to evoke speech that today,
above my head, it closes like great
wings. Distributed in each eye is a gunlock—

violence so golden you’d yearn to
touch it, by which the charge is
ignited, by which my boiling

lips hold together a hollow & breathless
cavity. The horizon edges curl wide.

Babysitting, child’s play

1
It’s kind of ironic.
What must I expect?
When must I fall
pregnant? Do the gumtrees decide
it all or are we still trying
to block out the white noise,
so they can hear us in the first place,
if I stuff their woody ears
with cotton balls, I can get real close
& speak in an almost hum, speak like a child—

2
Are we meant to be imitations
of England’s best, duplicating?
Who knows if the words must
be pushed past my teeth.
I taste the dry penny,
all liquid shrinks to heavy metals,
I smell like uranium,
I’ll burst any minute now.

3
Who wants to be a wet nurse?
Feeding their white babies,
grab the bucket & mop
until you wonder, on your knees,
if that’s really you in that white linen dress,
that’s who we were, questions
with legs, treated like answers &
worked to the bone.

4
There’s nothing special to the white home.
Just a little help here & there. Here & there.
I think you get it now, that our ancestors
are people too, they tire from their labours &
from watching ours, her hands
harsh like factory walls when
she could have been weaving her voice
into baskets. I think you’re outraged too.

5
Perhaps it’s all about the dance of it,
move away from lack, add to the sum
as if we lived on grid paper, number women,
our knuckles on our hips, angular—
pointing to something larger than ourselves
crying out to be born already.

6
So is this really what’s all about, obligations?
Obligations, obligations, they say that mothers
heal entire nations—that we have to in fact,
because what else will we be remembered by
when we’re dead, in the ochre sand?

7
I can see her at a bus stop, back sore
from imagining, like a ballerina, a string
tacked at the beginning of her spine,
sat up better than me, chin down.

8
Has anyone thought of the wet nurse more than once?
We don’t even know her name, we only know her
by her labour. Water glitters from her eyes
in that one photograph we have of her,
an English mother’s baby in her lap.

Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta writer, born in Australia. Her poems have appeared in Overland, Mascara Literary Review, and more. She runs the Substack Ladybug Central at dorothylune.substack.com.