Jane Downing
Nana’s timber house walked above the Queensland heat balancing on stilts like a circus act only then we called them stumps in the vernacular of the architecture this side of the bumpety-bump of the Hornibrook Highway bridge once we’d paid the toll My education in the underneath – cool darkness between concrete washtub and Granddad’s Holden colour of the chokos on the vine – was secret from the grownups inhabiting high-set rooms off an esophageally long corridor up steep stairs front and back Wooden battens screened us whale’s baleen filtering the adult talk dropped through open windows landing like the buzz of dying flies as generations of mothers whipped sugar into cream to make it peak setting the last off the boat to deseed the passionfruit, a rite of place The stumps protected the house from heat and termites and us pests till we grew up and went up and quietened down knowing when the years knocked and bruised we had to remember the stories underneath the darkness the laughing the living the loving the days without translation
Jane Downing’s poetry has appeared in journals around Australia including Meanjin, Cordite, Rabbit, Canberra Times, Bluepepper, Not Very Quiet, Social Alternatives, Best Australian Poems (2004 & 2015) and previously in Burrow. Her collection, ‘When Figs Fly’ (Close-Up Books) was published in 2019. She can be found at janedowning.wordpress.com
Old Water Rat Publishing 