Birthdays, poetry and the summer swims

Near perfect conditions today, and the thoughts of the Bold and Beautiful turn to the summer swims. What would it be? A triple? a 6km? A 10km? Listening to the conversations it struck me that pretty much everyone has a different way to prepare, from building up to the distance over a few weeks to electrolyte drinks, to extra water to a banana to simply showing up and having a crack. Just to name a few

Some of this morning’s swimmers

Newbie signing up

Dosed up with Vitamin Sea

Bindi did not swim

Nor did this pup

Lots and lots of swimmers

 

Just after the Let’s Go at the Point

Happy to be back in the water

Shortly after birthday boy Rob’s Let’s Go

The distance swimmers gather at the Point and what a jolly bunch they are!

En route we encountered Elizabeth on her way back from Freshy

The weed bed at Freshy

Some happy 6ers

What a fabulous morning it was!

What am I listening to? I just listened to an album called I’m Your Fan on Youtbube Music. It’s one of many tributes to Leonard Cohen. On the way home 702 radio was playing a piece about Jeff Buckley. Apparently his version of Hallelujah was a cover of John Cale’s version. I’ll let you be the judge of that

 

And now I have something really special for you. My friend David is a published and much awarded poet. I believe this offering was partly inspired by his children’s school’s refusal to allow him and his wife to take the children out of school to accompany David and his wife to the Northern Territory.

Tidal

David Adès

Now I am an endless swimming

in the restless seas of my children,

 

my muscles a constant burn and ache

 

keeping my head above the sparkle and glimmer and depths of them,

buffeted

by chop and swell, by wave after wave after wave,

by the vast oceans of their needs.

 

I could drift, inert, like seaweed,

but I must mediate the tug and pull

of their cross-currents,

watch the line of one daughter’s spine,

the shift of her shoulder-blades

as she sits on a piano stool spooling out notes,

apprehend the toddler

as he tears around the house on some manic mission

toothy-grinned and wicked with laughter,

contend with another daughter’s

relentless testing of boundaries.

 

Always, I watch for sharks and blood.

 

For so long

I have forgotten my needs except in tossing dreams in turn forgotten,

the fog of forgetting swirling thick

 

but there is no shame in conjuring them:

I need an island to beach myself upon,

the luxury of sand, palm trees, coconuts, a cold mango lassi

 

and a woman with open arms, a welcoming smile,

the invitation of her skin.

 

So much for dreams: the waves have me in their grip and I must swim on or sink.

 

Sometimes there are rhythms amid the turbulence,

the rhythm of a child’s breath in sleep,

the rhythm of school days when no one is sick

and nothing is forgotten, when routines click into place

without sudden squalls,

lashings of rain, howling winds

though nothing is given, the seas’ blue calm never more than mere interlude.

 

I take whatever interludes I get,

 

hauling myself onto some shore

to scratch a few words in the sand

only to watch them erased by the incoming tide.

 

In Darwin,

after the Mangrove boardwalk, where the girls took turns

in the hot sun reading signs

telling the story of the mangroves,

they walked on the beach, found pieces of coral

and shells, oceans to put to their ears,

and numerous holes in the sand,

a living world at their feet.

 

The school principal

declined applications for certificates of extended leave

deeming a week away from school

not to be within the girls’ best educational interests :

and we are stuck

with such a narrow definition of educational interests,

such obliviousness

and all it portends – the world at large

providing nothing educational —

 

not the mangroves or the beach,

not the knowledge of the mangroves shared by the First Peoples,

 

not the two hours they both spent intently peering through microscopes

in the Discovery Centre at the Museum

and making elaborate drawings

of sunflower pollen, hemp fibre, bottlebrush spore, cotton

fibre, fern spore, sponge gourd, common red sponge, wool, angora rabbit hair, mouse fur, cat hair, camellia leaf section, bamboo shoot, leaf of aelium, pine wood, stem of corn, nylon, onion rind, bemberg, pollen of lily,

 

not the rest of the day spent wandering through the Museum,

not the documentary of Aboriginal elders telling stories of their art,

 

not the exhibition of Aboriginal Art,

not standing before an artistic rendition of Maralinga

with all colour leached out and areas of smudged black and grey

and my explanation of the nuclear tests, the displacement and dispossession,

the blithe dismissal of culture,

 

not the wind-howling simulation of Cyclone Tracy,

not the photographs of Darwin’s destruction,

 

not the entire world beyond the classroom, the schoolyard —

 

so that even as I lay down rules,

as I set boundaries,

as father, as guardian, as shepherd of safety,

 

I am willing the breaking of them, the breaking through,

I secretly cheer the testing, the challenging,

constant and inevitable as the back and forth

of the tides,

as I navigate fatigue and childhood,

 

as I beach myself each night

 

while three worlds make themselves

whether I can keep up or not.