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Experiment 12

[seven untitled poems by Rosemary Randall]

page 17

Duck-damson-dazzle
Divers sea
Sheet-metal-flaming-fire
What crime what crime
So red so red
Flamingo-fallen sun
I knew sun in nigger-gold days
Of jungle-jaded sweat
Stale sweet smell from body oil
Toil heat cattle dung and
White teeth-shining laughter
But scarlet now geranium night
Paints pale lips
Night-bird-blues and
China slumber
Shoulder cross of
Strung
Hung
Sun.

Rosemary Randall

His eyes bore mine with a strange feroc-
City
And yet their plain is splendid for
And hour
Black on white where white has
Pierced
And blacker where the bullet
Holed
And yet is black that absorbs
Light
White is blind as al-
Bumen
But wedged to a stake his eyes
And mine
Probe the wound of minutes boring Inner
Secrete of unwhite souls and ra-
Dience
Shines on desert sand, palm Fronds fringe
Oasis well and somewhere, some-
where blood
Spurts clean and eyes shut over gut-
Ted wound.

Rosemary Randall

page 18

Who live in dark quiet, love in dark rooms,
Blanket aloneness with double embrace,
Feel through gloom for understanding
Where words are a silent desecration,
Where shadows falter on cracked walls,
Light sharp pain through curtain break
And cigarette air in thick, stale,
Where candy drips in syrup wine on
Drunk oblivion, a middle road,
A lesser death with no reward,
Who blindly love in dark, quiet tombs.

Rosemary Randall

White cruel white black-shadow white
Stark, staring, walls of stone
Dry dust pallor, silent streets
Long and narrow granite gleaming
Glaring under white-heat sun
In a sky of diamond fury,
No pity here no mercy shred
Lidded eyes of starched bone men
Blind by too bright
Screaming light
With salt parched tongues
In gaping mouths that
Make no cry,
Silent kill of sterile white
Alabaster, plaster planes
A speechless solitude of marble
Statues chocked with desert sand.

Rosemary Randall

page 19

Stones sing, Hammer, part our tissue,
Ice runs cold in fire,
Birds drop winged eggs from premature wombs,
Bald sun melts in a sea of milk,
Dewlap forms on hills
Hammer, sing stones,
Carry away from breast of creation,
Cry stones, cry stones,
Feed no milk to soften bones,
Hard, and raw we are the hills
On our mother's back;
She who bore us is dried with tears,
Infant skies burden her furrowed brow;
We stones shall bear stones which
Labour raise
Bastard memorial on her tomb.

Rosemary Randall

Soft on the death-bed silent night
Mildew settles on sealed lids and
Over the sleeping humpbacked quilt
Clutching exbrace of shapeless sleep
Curls and cuddles cat-lithe limbs -
O, sleep, who honour not the day,
Sleep in live-bed dreaming night;
Too abruptly morning breaks
On eyes dew-moist with river-weed,
Sail on, sail on the torpid tide
Mole under ground from truth too bare,
Cover in dew wash silted eyes and
Dare not gaze on blood-rich sun
Foreboding kill of warning day.

Rosemary Randall

We shall go into a night of love
And buckle our teeth on jawbone dark
And from a single eclipsing force
Bury a seed in black time womb
To grow on honest ground
For dust honours dust and
Dust reclaimed is gentle dust
And in the frozen silent birth
Hold back the cry that makes us two.

Rosemary Randall