MAREE GLADWIN
Maree Gladwin is a Melbourne-based musician, poet, artist, and ardent traveller who loves everything queer and surprising!
With a doctorate in politics, Maree has worked in universities and the not-for-profit sector in the UK and Australia.
Her poems in English and French appeared in the Poetry D’Amour anthology, Love Poems, 2018.
CITY POETS
I am envious of poets
who live close to nature
whose words spring from the
loamy earth under their feet and
spray forth to glisten and sparkle
in their light-filled air.
Who stand in moonlight listening for the sound
of owls and sometimes for peace and
the quiet of things. Who know and speak
the names of every familiar plant and bush
and flower and move our hearts with stories
of the passing of time and love and the
inevitable naturalness of death. Here
in my asphalt-encircled capsule
of a house with forty-seven cafes and three
supermarkets within walking distance
there is only the pure blue of the far off
Australian sky. On my way down
the street I pick up empty beer bottles
and toss them in the nearest
recycling bin. Beside the footpath
a eucalypt has died on the
doorstep of an expensive
apartment. Confined to one small
square of earth and weeds, its elegant
trails of white-bloomed leaves are now
shrivelled and brown. People living there
pass it every day but for them nature
is an unknowable foreign country.
Down the street, a man is knocked
off his bike by a car that veered across
the bicycle lane. In the Syrian coffee shop
a trio of well-dressed businessmen meet to
gossip in Russian. A customer tells of how
he lost his job because of covid. He has found
a wallet in the street and is searching
for its owner on Facebook.
In the world of city poets, all hope
for humanity is not lost but lives on
between the cracks in the relentlessly
hard grey surface of our everyday lives.
Maree Gladwin © 2024
DREAMING OF CUSTARD
i am living for the day when I realise
that i don’t hate you any more. maybe,
it will happen in the silence of the custard
my spoon opening up a yellow void
and finding nothing beneath but an emptiness
that once overflowed with the green acid bile
of fury only just suppressed and now rendered
soft and creamy — not quite like the milk of human
kindness but with a blessed blandness that releases me
from a sleepless night into the fresh, sun-touched golden
tongue-licking mellowness of a first hate-free day.
Prompted by Ali Whitelock’s poem ‘in the silence of the custard’ from her collection
The Lactic Acid in the Calves of Your Despair, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2020
Maree Gladwin© 2024
over the rainbow
at the concert I cry
quiet tears to the tune of
somewhere over the rainbow
all that heartfelt hope, all that yearning
for a better place over there
and what do we have?
I can’t wait
for the bluebirds can’t wait
for the way up there
I don’t know what to say
to my Jewish American friend
well-intended words
rain soft but silence
rains harder
a too-long pause
across the divide a fear
of trust shattering
silence clothes wordless
anger
I hold my tongue
not knowing
where to look for the cache
at the end of the rainbow.
Maree Gladwin© 2024
