Two poems

Lapis Lazuli i.m. Robert Adamson I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here, Through the live-streaming lens, An unseen absent presence, moved to watch This gathering of your friends, And all it comprehends: Love, praise and memories, your poems of course. But, I don’t know, what may Have been most moving in the whole occasion Was, following that display Of photographs, the way Your voice broke in, and there you were on film, Chatting and answered by Spinoza (so he’s learned to talk?), with his Impossibly blue eye Of lapis lazuli. The first time that we saw him, Judy wore Earrings of that same stone, And Spin perched on her shoulder, where he had Immediately flown, To claim them for his own, Or try to, pecking, jabbing, without success. And now I think of Yeats And his determination to believe That gaiety mitigates, Indeed transforms our fates, Beyond the tragic scene on which we stare, Transfiguring that dread – An image carved in lapis lazuli The talisman which fed The faith he credited. Not sure I share it, but, while the footage played, I wanted to comply, Watching you chat and chuckle with Spinoza – Brief days before you die – Eye to glittering eye. Stephen Edgar Spinoza (Spin) is a satin bowerbird which Robert Adamson rescued and raised. Stephen Edgar’s most recent collection is The Strangest Place (Black Pepper, 2020). Hawkesbury i.m Robert Adamson Above the cliff a Brahminy kite circles on an updraught, holds the scene in the keen, yellow charge of its eyes. Earlier I watched a sea-eagle ride a disc of air – then suddenly pull its wings into a deft stoop, a high-speed dive before it let down its talons like a set of stevedoring hooks, snatching up a rat lying in a warm coil of rope on the dock. Perhaps the kite will take a fish from the water, or another nesting rat. Now it simply circles, a slow enchantment whose purpose seems impossible from so very high up. And you are gone, Robert, from your high place above the water, gone from the mudflats and the river where your words conjured a raptor’s view, the Hawkesbury surveyed with your sharp, rapturous eye. I walk back to the wharf, a crow calls with a voice of charred gloom. The kite has drifted away to circle and hunt elsewhere. I watch crabs on the mudflats work their claws around mangrove roots pegged out like snorkellers. And I think of you, Robert, pen in hand, breathing easily – words angling deeply – poem after poem pulled from the river. Judith Beveridge Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music (Giramondo, 2018). Robert Adamson, 1943–2022 (photograph by Juno Gemes)

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The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of memory, mourning and consolation edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice by Anne Manne

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