Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Cause and Effect
That’s what happened:
his factory was fined for coughing thick smoke
from its stacks, so his boss has him working later
to claw back the shortfall; you stop waiting up for him
after too many nodding nights and roll away in bed;
you feel lonelier together and avoid hard discussions
until he explodes with frustration over some little
thing that stands for many big things and the children
watch; you bundle up the children, take the dented car
on its last rubber and some changes of clothes; he’ll
oversleep and argue with his boss, your alarm is gone,
your warm arm across his shoulder is gone; you find
something temporary and odious in another city,
near a noisy, unfriendly harbour; he takes some
enforced time away from work, his boss writes a report;
he begs your friends for your new number, they’re
reluctant, and on the night he calls you all the lines are
down and there’s some calamity of water pushing,
churning up that city on the late impersonal news.
That’s what happened:
you settled like some smattering of dust,
languorous and smeary as the first coat of disaster;
you sweated beneath that layering of smoke, absorbing
sunlight and weeping down the rivers; you sizzled your
glacier down into the ocean; you swallowed all
the water like a drunkard, purging and diluting that
suspension of salt, until the dark and ponderous
channels of your motions switched like circuits,
spilled to tipping and your empty mouth of air
breathed in a sirocco, where normally the cold
flutes of the wind would drown the ocean’s clouds;
until you couldn’t stop the roiling and the spiral
of the cumuli nimbus as it gathered on the water
and glowered at the antennas blindly sleeping above
your city, beyond the resolute and streaky man-made
reefs; you pushed and shoved towards the open harbour;
you couldn’t hold the sea back from the sea break.
That’s what happened:
you couldn’t hold the sea from the sea break;
the tide surged up the river and plundered basements
and plugged carparks and choked substations;
you couldn’t bear the water so your pumps sputtered;
your power peaked and plummeted and died;
you couldn’t keep the lights on and the towers
stopped relaying calls and the food bloated
and turned and the water, stale with rising sewerage;
and she couldn’t drink from the sluggish taps;
and her little scratches were hot and puffy; she
couldn’t call you because the towers were silent;
and they looted what they could because they were
desperate; and they stole from you what they could
because they were desperate; and your foundations
shifted under the crawling mud and coughing water
so buildings wavered and fainted into the streets;
and when the rain stopped and the water left the city
you were so many broken empty bodies.
That’s what happened.
Damen is a multi-award-winning Australian poet. His prizes include The Moth Poetry Prize and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His poems have been published in New Ohio Review, Arc Poetry Journal, Aesthetica Magazine and many other journals. Damen’s latest book of poetry is Walking the Boundary.