Robyn J Black | Website
Robyn J Black
Phone: +6108553087
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24.01.2022 IT’S ALL IN THE SONG It’s getting dark; the sky is lined with rumbling grey clouds tumbling into the approaching night. A lone cricket has taken up the challenge in close whilst a distant cricket orchestra cymbals gently out further on... the dusk. The dog over the back fence barks, a general who-goes-there? type enquiry - a single yelp answered immediately and calmly by my own dog - and I sense a canine sharing; ‘what?’ ‘yeah’, ‘you OK?’ exchange. The night closes in; a pair of plovers squall , untraceable, across the arc of dimmed sky, raising distant, primitive fears. The cricket chorus chirps on, dragging wing-edge over wing-edge, calling loudly now for their girls, stridulating, boasting, jostling for position in the close summer night air his hands push insistently on my shoulders, press my body into the damp, coarse river sand, his breath hot and sour with rum and cigarettes hovers, a silencing; the night stirs and rustles and the crickets don’t miss a beat. Robyn Black
22.01.2022 GV Writers Group meets Wed 11th October at the Terminus Hotel Shepparton (7pm) so any poets or writers in town about then please come along and share your work! Check www.gvwritersgroup.com out for more info and the opportunity to buy tamba magazine - available in book or e-copy form.
20.01.2022 Splinter We sit suspended in the lull of late afternoon and I hold his hand I have trimmed the nails and buffed the edges smooth, anything to fill the stretching quiescence... His mind sputters and coughs like the misfiring 186 I helped him to fix all those years ago, when the silence was all about concentrating on the task I try to follow as he roils through twilight corridors, memories flickering like the shaky 8 mil movies with which he meticulously chronicled our lives Now it seems he has rambled off-course, his being has diverged from the essence of him, has peeled slowly away in a fractured parody of body-and-soul He is enigma now, a maze of blood and skin and bone melded in slow waltz with fragmented memories whispering slyly in foreign tongue. I touch but cannot reach him. Robyn Black
19.01.2022 Cockatoos They paint a moving splash of white and camouflage on the rising sky, a loose line of screeching glee splattering themselves on the fleeting moment and driving wind,... screaming across my day as I drive the blue-metal road and I try to keep them in sight and stay on the road at the same time and my gaze switches between road and sky, gets shorter and quicker and I strain to keep them in view even as cruise control rushes me forward and now I throw instant glances at sky-road-verge-ahead-sky-road and just like that - they are gone and I am gone and the moment in all its glorious, ephemeral purity is gone. Robyn Black
18.01.2022 Vale Alan Mathews - longest serving member of the Goulburn Valley Writers Group Inc., former editor of Tamba Magazine and winner of the 2017 Joseph Furphy Commemorative Literary Prize - Open Poetry section. Better writer than any of us! Alan, we will get 'Jock' published somehow. The world is a better place for having your poetry in it.
16.01.2022 Bounced He sways out of nightclub hubris, slides a hand along ... bricks that slap vacant shadows back on a face pale with bourbon overload, bruises deepening to the dull-blue thumping of the looming Monday morning. (Published Regime Magazine issue 2013) ... and explains what colour Monday is - only those with synesthaesia will get that!
15.01.2022 One of my favourite Alan Mathews poems from his 2006 book Blackbird Singing. Alan and his family ran their fruit orchard for many years and he was a gentle and elegant man who quietly observed life, seeing the best in people. This poem is a snapshot in the time of seasonal work some years ago, and a peek into the world of the transient relationships of the fresh-faced young people who followed the harvest trail. april song In april the fruit harvest ends, and because there... is no other work those who came for the season return home or move on. And the young men leave the girls they met during the summer. The days are quiet now. In all the camps the vans are leaving. From the spent trees all the pretty leaves are falling looking to winter. It'll seem that quiet when you're gone. I'll always remember the lovely way we had our summer - up at the bridge, the swimming there, the channels wide and shining so, and pink at evening. It felt so good to be with you. And weekends waiting every Friday - two lovely days to call our own. Oh, this summer was just a gift you gave me - nothing's been the same! It's beaut the photos turned out well. But all the camps are breaking. In just two days you'll be in Queensland. It'll seem that quiet when you're gone. Alan Mathews
13.01.2022 Bunyip It hunkers in dusked shadows, slowly flexing and contracting with each laboured breath, growing ever larger - curved... tusks glistening under glower of eye Kaieltheban woman drifts in lee of current feet sculpt digging tool, scrunching coarse river-sand through arch and heel, scoops up hard-shelled mussel, clammed fearful and closed her story ripples over gill and scale, dips through billabong, climbs clay bank on lizard toe and lifts into hot cicada’d air, is picked up by the river birds clacking gossip passed on from beak to bone to clawed perch view in eucalypt canopy where expectantthey watch she senses a shift, feels the warp and weft of her songline being tugged and snapped, raw and savage the air bridles and writhes rends open with teratoid roar, and she is suddenly gone removed from Language from this moment forward but now, the river birds sweep up the wail, screech it from outpost to outpost squall raucous narrative along Kaiela, snaking through time, away and away they refine the refrain, perfect the chorus, lay down the coda of loss they know this song, they have heard it before. Robyn Black
10.01.2022 Changeling (Parliament expresses our formal and sincere apology to the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who were profoundly harmed by past adoption practices in Victoria Parliamentary Apology [by] Government of Victoria, Australia, 2012) My mother never knew my face no touch of tiny fingers... counted toes or holding close yet she felt me insistently, I would have pushed against soft membrane fluttered, elbowed and booted gently swelling against convention maybe I announced myself with hiccups and heartburn and a sadness too empty to describe if she had been allowed; the succour of mouth and nipple denied, how she must have cried with only imagined imprint of touch to scar empty palms the years have now ticked full lifetimes and yet the mirror traps echoes, each glance a question A changeling, amorphous and unconnected our shadows do not touch I have no measure, nor memory just these hands that I watch. Robyn Black
