Two Seasons in One Day

~ in Melbourne ~

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day darkened
nails of freezing rain
shot from the gun-
metal sky.

Outlaw clouds
raced
to the hills

Sun edgy, waited
for a clear space
to fire.

Cold street puddles
filled turquoise
with sudden sky.

Backstreet Beauty

~ in Abbotsford ~

Rusty corrugated iron fences
concrete slabbed
loading bays
of old factories.

In pitted courtyards
disdainful weeds
sprouting
gaudy and tall
through cracking tarmac

purples and yellows
mirror-imaged
in oily-puddled
potholes.

© M.L.Emmett

 

This is not Manet’s Paris

on The Bar by Melbourne artist John Brack

This is not Edouard Manet’s Paris
Not that white marble bar, un bar aux Folies-Bergère
with that peachy round, velvet-corseted young woman
soft unseen hands of a lacy courtesan
on display with the pale pink roses and juicy mandarins
facing the elegant 19th C chandeliered room
and her gentleman admirers.

No this is Brack’s Bar
Melbourne in the fifties
when the Collins Street mob
have knocked off
to schooner themselves
’til six o’clock and home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Squared and angular this woman is omnipotent
A working mother with dark shadowed eyes
she offers nothing more than serving drinks
and mopping up the mess men leave behind
working stoical hands planted on the bar ready
ready for action, ready for anything, coping
giving nothing but her labour
can’t complain, who’d listen ?

But those spring poppies playful
in that over ripe womb vase
they are a future hope of things to come
alive and real they belong to her
and she will take them home.