From my crows-nest home on this sudden ridge
carmine clouds dissolve into noisy gloaming
as cockatoos screech—beyond blue-shadowed valleys
orange lasers the desiccated plains that lead west
toward you, my lucent child.
At our first embrace chest-to-breast, seconds old,
still connected, you embraced me with such intensity
most newborns don't hug like that the midwife said
handing your father a blade to cut the cord.
I named you bringer of light.
By ten months you stopped crawling, stood up.
Without taking one tentative baby step
you ran after other children at a party—
since that day, you've travelled at breakneck speed
toward your horizon daring us to keep up.
Up here, darkness and fog swaddle the dividing range.
Night will take two hours more to blanket
the bare plains, silvered scrub and salt lakes,
an all-but-deserted majesty extending between us
so many milestones and time zones apart.
Over there, limestone sand blows sharp against your skin
delivered by the Antarctic wind they call 'The Fremantle Doctor',
a baking city you declare is home for now.
Your cornflower-blue eyes watch another ocean sunset:
I know you crave a life beyond these shores.
I recall telling you about my first journey to Ireland
and how the gulls of The Liffey cried out in greeting
—an inchoate song of loss sounding in my heart.
Bloom's Day, poetry, pints of on-tap-Guinness,
balms all for diasporic pilgrims yet to learn a brutal
history told at the famine museum at Strokestown.
I drink tea and contemplate the quantum of maternal tears
shed for all those young and vibrant souls leaving
on the heartbreak swell of the Irish Sea
newlyweds from the West Country who'd sailed
to Liverpool seeking work, only to find their one chance
lay in an assisted passage to the colony of NSW.
Returning as a family to Ireland for Winter Solstice
we roamed along the Wild Atlantic Coast
atop Salthill met a lazy pink dawn that gilt the wingspans
of Great Black-Backed Gulls who harried updraft currents
then swooped down into a postcard Galway Bay.
Above the Cliffs of Moher our laughter clattered like ice
through a bitter white-out that stalked our progress
over pointless famine roads as night outran a muffled day
single candles shone welcome in distant windows
and you smiled in relief to see their glow.
Cosseted later in Dublin's grandest hotel, I wrapped presents
as you learned the code of those candles,
a resistance burning on the darkest and holiest of nights
by a people starved for the sacraments of faith, hope and freedom.
Your framed photo of our Irish odyssey sits on my desk.
We are together at last—you, your brother, your dad, me,
smiling, frozen in the winter sun of St Stephen's Green,
site of fierce gun battles waged for independence.
There you uttered it feels like we've come home.
Though this mountain house is so far from Ireland
and not your childhood home
a solo candle will stand in this window
waiting, always, for you.
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Linda Adair is a poet and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of Rochford Street Review and a (re)emerging artist. Her many Irish ancestors arrived in the early to mid 19th century, to escape the English occupation of Eire and the politicisation of the food shortage which became a polite genocide but was rebranded as the Great Famine. Born on Darug Land in the era of the 'Great Australian Silence' of what colonisation really meant, Adair explores the stories of women and men marginalised by history in her poems. Her extended family comprises First Nations people and she pays her respect to the Traditional Custodians of the land and Elders past present and emerging.
Her debut poetry collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union, launching on Zoom due to Covid. Her poetry has been published in various online and print journals, both in Australia and internationally. She has featured at La Mama Poetica, The Bergy Bandroom as part of 2023 Sonic Poetry Festival, Don Banks, Poetry at The Wickham, Cuplet, Reading the River at Brooklyn, Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives, Back to Newnes Day, and at Newcastle Writers Festival.
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