Three Poems by Marilyn Humbert

 

In-between-time

 

There’s a hush

as the sun slips lower

the stillness of long shadows

 

in half-light we wait

for the boatman’s wherry,

a copper coin gripped in your fist.

 

Yesterday, we rambled

between towering eucalypts

to the clearing where smoke spirals

upward in lazy coils.

 

Today thin-birdsong fills the space.

Your breath slows, my hand on yours

beneath starched white sheets.

 

Can you hear the creek rattling over rocks

becoming louder, speeding round the bend.

Day is settling and night is yet to begin.

 

 

Lost in the City

 

From the rise

the city’s glow spreads up

illuminating the darkness

a beacon, tugs this outback refugee

fuels imagined opportunities.

 

How could I know:

the crush of others like me

where hope is swallowed

in a neon fog.

 

I sit under my bodhi tree

of ever-changing traffic lights:

worn cap beside a scrawled sign

kangaroo tracks far behind.

 

Is that a magpie carolling…

 

 

Gariwerd

 

Forest music summons me with chords passed down

from the beginning. Through dappling canopy

I see a shadow-man wreathed in leaves, cloaked in sunlight.

His voice joins the wind whispering to wrens and magpies

strutting around wallabies grazing in a mossy clearing.

 

The wind calms.  I rest my hand on Gariwerd’s rock,

and the apparition vanishes. Eroded pebbles rattle at my feet.

Branches creak overhead weighed down with time.

I search the flickering shadows filled with a loneliness.

Grey-beard monoliths, each season’s cycle a blink in their lives.

 

Gariwerd – The Grampians Victoria Australia

 

Marilyn Humbert lives on Darug and GuriNgai land in Berowra, NSW Australia. Her tanka and haiku appear in International and Australian journals, anthologies and online. Her free verse poems have been awarded prizes in competitions, published in anthologies, journals and online most recently in Burrow and FemAsia Magazine.