A Broken World: Introducing the Poetry of Magdalena Ball
It is Chol Ha’moed, the intermediary days of Pesach and the news keeps coming and it is all bad. I have found myself sitting with friends and family visiting from overseas defending Israel. The horrible choices of the government. The unclear future we all face. How can we change this broken world? The lesson of Pesach is that even when things look their worst, change can happen. I have found myself this holiday thinking about those forty years of wandering. The chance to change, within one generation, the way people think. I find that wandering in the poems of Magdalena Ball. It is the natural world and our relationship to it that she wants us to imagine again. There are no easy solutions in these poems, but oh, how they help us to think and rethink. Moadi’im L’simcha.
Impermanence
This is where we begin
walking into forbidden spaces.
I touch your arm, skin on skin, colony
within a colony, only 43% human.
There’s no shame in admitting
you are more than half bacteria,
virus, fungi and archaea, a cobbled-together
terminal community.
Cells connect, divide, decay, find comfort
in collusion.
In the evening, sound changes, undercuts
our shared grief, sooty owls, crickets.
In the end, it comes down to this
nothing doesn’t exist.
Even a vacuum is filled with particles
and particles are in constant motion
changing form. When I see you moving
from solid to liquid, water to air
I’d give everything
to reach your ruined body.
Your eyes were once a colour
myopic but flashing.
That’s no way to describe a life
synecdoche, blinking in and out
appearing and disappearing
fluctuating bubbles.
We have already begun the process
of transformation,
everything you ever touched, imprinted.
patchouli and jasmine
an opening against the illusion
of autobiography, this fragile body
built from scavenged materials
connected through DNA and dirt, porous
borrowed from who came before
loaned to who will come.
The future is collective, connective
you are not alone, I am not
sinking into blue, breathing in your
space, changing phase.
Learning the Mother Tongue
At a distance of some remove, in the grace of a
painted opening, we find each other.
You sip slowly, a bottomless cup, click
of porcelain, steam rising on your thick glasses,
fingers no longer shaking. I wondered for years
if I’d ever find my way into this room
in-between worlds. Will I ever find my way
back, if back is even a direction from here
where space curves onto itself
and the dead talk freely without sound.
I’ve been learning to listen. It hasn’t been easy,
I’m a product of time, trapped in vocabulary,
angles, groping against the wall, afraid to
let go, or that I might lose you, or myself.
The mother tongue is common ground,
a language we both still speak.
What is carried in those hushed
vowels, twisting around edges?
How they disassemble
and unmake, all we’ve
bound into the bitter scent
of morning coffee.
Rufous Fantail
Can we trust the sunset,
the wagging fantail stopping
close enough to stare, black eye
fixed on my wet face, a private
conversation in code then
darting away
starting a signal chain reaction.
Alive only in the second
it takes a bird to disappear.
Exponential growth is another
form of breakdown,
delineation is illusion
a one-legged race to the bottom.
What does bottom look like? There
is no bottom, the Earth is round
but what would I know
kissing the ground, tears
for the riverbed, collusion everywhere
geosphere and biosphere
every birth shifts
the threshold, a surrender.
Pompadour After Christine Dean, Pink Monochrome (detail), c1995 Oh when I saw you there your little eye wounded in monochrome, proud texture the translation said soft but that wasn’t quite right there was give, and then the draw. Your voice came through soundless, a memory, desire pink, yes, but not the way you put circles of rouge on a white canvas, grieving what was to come. I used to think of beauty in rigid ways cascade of hair, a tight curve shapes and dreams. The way your strength was held taut against a gilt mirror invisible beneath layers of paint lead, mercury, arsenic the pull of a string, ache in the belly formaldehyde, galena, botulism a sharpened knife, a knife, a knife a blade, the whoosh as it falls and all your pretty silence bearing down. Things are different now each line is an opening, a new story the downward shift a renewal. Don’t talk to me of what you lost in those last days buckles, powder, lace your tongue blooming shades of blush, coral, rose always speaking but no sound.
Glass Snails
i.
Soon we will all learn to live with less
whorls, shell, house, car.
This might have occurred over
generations, a slow transition
natural selection, natural replacement
homo erectus to homo sapiens
homo sapiens to intelligentia artificialis
strepsodiscus to oxychilidae.
Given the situation we find
ourselves in, it’s faster
a problem we can’t solve, only mitigate.
retraction, reduction, inequities
trying to slow the pace, leaving
the slightest silver trail.
ii.
The mollusk is a calcium barometer.
Holds the weight of our world
in pockets, glorious colors flashing
over a transparent body.
Palm fronds, leaf litter, fungi, easy
to crush, eyes on the future.
We didn’t know, didn’t see
what was happening
tragedy of the horizon, perhaps
we can bring them back
frankensnails, shells glued
kintsugi-style.
What mad doctor will bring us back?
Nothing, no-thing, creature or stone
exists in isolation. The link that makes
the difference is not so easy to spot.
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, Sustainability Manager, Vice President of Flying Island Poetry Community and Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader. She is an in-demand moderator at many Australian writers festivals, and has interviewed over 150 writers for the Compulsive Reader Talks podcast, now in its 27th year. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, and has won or shortlisted in local and international awards and in 2023 was one of the shortlisted authors for a Red Room Fellowship. She is the author of two novels and seven poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023. Find out more at: http://www.magdalenaball.com
Delights!
Five Tiny Delights:
- Sitting on a rock in the beautiful forest I am lucky enough to live in, smelling the eucalyptus and dank vegetation and feeling part of a greater whole.
- That first strong coffee in the morning - so much promise and a daily reminder of the (safe, comforting) scent of my grandmother’s kitchen
- Opening a superb book and being astounded from the very first sentence
- Getting to the end of the book and being so immersed I hide and ignore every chore so I can finish it
- My dog’s soft fur and gentle heft warming my feet on a cold day
Five Tiny Jewish Delights:
- Eating a fresh bagel (or better, a Sabich) with my daughter outside at Avner’s bakery in Sydney
- Tahini mixed with pickle juice (let’s call it a salad dressing but I’m not above drinking it - tell me you’re Jewish without telling me you’re Jewish)
- Suddenly realizing at 50+ that my extended hand mannerisms, way of talking to strangers in a queue, or crazy hair were just part of my Judaism.
- Julis Louis-Dreyfus - I really love her podcast Wiser Than Me and keep finding myself quoting from it (I also experience delight everytime someone tells me I remind them of Elaine)
- My daughter’s home made chocolate babka. She makes it with the perfect blend of love and anxiety and it tastes incredible. Every other babka is the lesser babka.
Ahhh. I needed this today.
These are lovely.