Margaret Owen Ruckert
You gave us a reason to love you
we were family
Grannie lived over the line
We would write our address
innocently
learn it by heart
We believed you
took you seriously
but then we grew
Found your wood had walked
and your river, hidden
a long way from town
Your timber turpentine
long wagonned to Sydney
floating her wharves
The back of our land
grew fertile memories
of a tall, ancient forest
An immense reach of trees
over so many summers
shaded our hens
You were once a prized suburb
a local golf course
Blue Mountains’ views
We learnt of your past
American post-war camps
the stigma of ‘different’
You could never escape
the ‘Herne Bay’ of notoriety
not even with a name change
I know your streets
you walked me to school
placed me in the world
I fly down your stairs
another worker
trained for the city
No doubt I’ll return
Margaret Owen Ruckert is a prize-winning poet and widely published. She is a former TAFE Science lecturer, whose love of language helped her multi-skill into ESL teaching. Other positions have included church organist and tax clerk. Two books, You Deserve Dessert and musefood (an IP Book of the Year,) explore café and street culture. She has written six books of tanka; many of the individual tanka have been published online. Sky on Sea, her latest, matches poems to photographs of Sydney waterways. Margaret presents workshops as Facilitator of Hurstville’s Discovery Writers and convenes a Café Poetry group.
Old Water Rat Publishing 