Feature poet

Feature Poet: Craig McGregor

Paperbark

Silvered dew drops Danced down from the paperbark trees Black bunyips swam around the swimming pool White dingos howled the suburban night away I woke and watched the sunlight sliver Into millions of shared remembrances Of tent ropes, guys and guitar strings And blackened campfire ashes And possums scrabbling like children And the faerie majesty of rock faces Which loomed through our nightmares And white cockatoos screaming like banshees And elves that spluttered like Irish playwrights And the mythical stories that Grandpa told While drinking whiskey from his homegrown still About Aboriginal initiations on the South Coast And the bash of Brogo rain on the chaff shed And Hexham mosquitoes as big as bananas And frost as bitter as memories And cold wind slashing like a harvester And bonfires that burnt the tussocks to death And kids that cried in the night for no reason And others for all the evil in the world And flying angels that bled like Raphael And Celtic tales of love and redemption And brute lust and shame And how we all sang hymns of forgiveness And poets who rhymed our fears away And humming birds that sang with their wings And dragonflies which skimmed the surface of dreams

And nightbirds that hallowed the moon And the sweetness of sweat on your flesh As I traversed your footsteps and your lovers And we tried to reclaim the world as our own And I thought of all that stuff writers imagine And decided…this will have to do Until you return. To me.

Iluka

Along the beach the fishermen stand Like sentries, spaced for distance, Each with his regulation hat and rod Copycat silhouettes against the sun show Harvesting the surf, or trying to.

A stranded tree trunk, silver-white as driftwood, Waits for seagulls. Sandcrabs burrow the littoral With holes like burnt-out craters and constellated sandballs Like miniature Mount Olgas. There’s shattered timber everywhere Destroyed detritus like Dresden But less hellish, from the last cyclone Which erased Woody Head of its name.

But I’m tired of lyric poetry About riverboats and runabouts And jetties and tiresome tinnies And red-green strobe that guide the trawlers Past the sandbar to fish the coast. Out there are islands, which seem like islands, But they conjoin beneath the earth’s curve And form an arc which, broken Barricades the ocean – the real sea.

I fear for the fishermen who dare that so-called Pacific A liquid desert as endless as the maps Which failed to chart its ever-retreating horizon And as dire, in its way, as the North Sea Which fashioned Cook in Yorkshire gales And who set out, in an old coal tub, To conquer the sea-girt world.

Cook! who left behind, two centuries later, In Whitby, the smell of fish-and-chips And a whitewashed attic room Not unlike the Captain’s Where we set out on a risky adventure of our own.

Much-loved local author and friend of northerly and Byron Writers Festival, Craig McGregor, died earlier this year at the age of eighty-eight. Prior to his experiencing a stroke in 2018, Craig, an award-winning journalist, novelist and critic, wrote these two poems, which we are pleased to publish posthumously here.