Black Lives Matter, bushfires and Covid raged around Melbourne author Maxine Beneba Clarke as shetapped into an ancestral tradition of using art to express the unthinkable
Some authors write for escape. I wrote poetry during the pandemic to process, to meditate on the world that was, to try and make some sense of things as a writer, and hopefully to offer some peace to at least one reader, somewhere, somehow.
When Covid lockdowns started across Melbourne in 2020, my income all but dried up. In between the online schooling and Covid-test runs, the mask-sourcing and endless Zoom calls, the online grocery shopping and mapping the curve, I turned, in comfort, to my first love: poetry.
hannah and them kids died brutal
we don’t know ’em all from soap
but it aches my soul to muse on it
so babe, your mama needs to know
that a good man
exactly the man you’ll be
will lead a bad man home.
painting gives pennies back to medicare …
old time jazz, that opera, eases congestion
in the hospitals, helps our old folks live longer in their homes
… poetry is why that kid so close to falling
through the cracks
even gets up
and goes to school … art is the heart of all that we are.