Ynes Sanz: BIG TED

In a recurring dream I am opening a toybox, or sometimes it’s a cupboard, to rummage through mounds of toys that are unfamiliar, though all have the soft contours and faded colour of long use. Have I forgotten them? Perhaps I never owned them at all, but coveted them when they belonged to little friends whose names are lost.

In the gardens of my childhood there were often bomb shelters half buried in the soil. Inside, in the dusty shadows, we children could sometimes find, like family secrets, small traces of the people who tried to rest there night after night. Overhead, flying bombs had made their erratic grinding passage or suddenly cut their engines, to drop in an instant, or drift on, with a faint noise like wind, over the hundreds of hidden upward-gazing heads.

in the air-raid shelter
a plastic brooch.......shot
from a Christmas cracker

In a recurring memory, my father lifts me up to press a button in the blue Police Box at the corner of our road. I am only a toddler but already I know that I must do it right. If my small finger wobbles, the siren sound will not come out in the steady ‘All Clear’ of the test signal, but will make the terrible undulating wail that means an air-raid. I will frighten all the people for miles around, and young as I am, I know they have already been frightened more than enough.

playing on the bombsite
she cradles
a one-legged doll

At the Op shop again, I search with a kind of hunger for the thing that will reveal itself as what I am looking for. Ribbons, a silver christening cup, a walking stick, a cushion with a sentimental verse? A huge square wooden market fruit bin overflows with discarded fluffy toys. I systematically work my way through the pile. Whatever it is, I can’t find it here.
.

battered photograph
trying to see the face
of the toy in my arms

by Ynes Sanz
Brisbane, Qld., Australia

Ynes Sanz: THE MAN IN BLACK

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jam nite at the havana bar but none of the punters will step up to the mike though the prize is a bar tab and drink is what's mainly on their minds and the mc's playing ani di franco on his national guitar but the ladies want it danceable so he grins and gives them brown-eyed girl trying to squeeze a show from a crowd that's just happy to dance as long as he's happy to play

no takers for the open mike so a mate steps up with a black hat on and a borrowed guitar and they're crooning and strumming for the late great johnny milking it for all they're worth then a guy with stockman's legs turns his butt to the crowd leaning into the mike for a boy named sue and after a couple more in memory of the man we're all feeling comfortable nursing a beer

darwin pub crawl
getting a skinful
of iced water

then there's something latin on the bar-room tv and black hat's murmuring his poems close to my ear and saying do i want a dance and i tell him i lost all the dance i ever had in me but he won't take a no and next thing my feet are giving it up for a passable samba and the hips are playing along and my face is smiling dancing with a partner first time in years and back on the bar stool i'm feeling pretty smug

and up on stage some little guy's playing a mean air guitar on a pool cue flying so high i'm halfway to believing i can hear the riffs and that's when i finally get it

always was a sucker for a well strung line

telling the stories
all over again
time to go home

by Ynes Sanz

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

first published in talking poetry blues, 2006

Ynes Sanz: ARCHIPELAGO

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all the humid night the fan squeaks like a blowfly in a jar or a distant corella calling in flight

morning comes and the ceiling timbers are the first thing i see their joints discontinuous as lines of morse code or a transcript of the faltering conversation of people who do not yet know each other

above my head the boards are easing apart to release dark beginnings small falls of webby dust depositions of previous lives old memories others’ voices and dream utterances sifting down into the room

outside a neighbour child plays with a mock-growling dog a cell phone chirps and a crow asserts its right to the clothes hoist

and daylight colours-in the room as you swim up through waves of sleep and into my arms

a room full of words
among book islands
our easy silence

by Ynes Sanz

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

first published in talking poetry blues, 2006