Two Poems
Janet Kenny
Arguing with the Dead
My mother argued with the dead.
I listened as she settled scores.
I couldn’t quite hear what she said
as she performed domestic chores.
The whispered accusations spat
as apparitions filled the room.
They reached the corner where I sat,
a small intruder in the gloom.
Sometimes the dead were still alive
but trapped by distance in the past.
Their living presence could arrive
with gifts and smiles that didn’t last.
And so mistrust absorbed when young
was planted by a mother’s tongue.
- - -
Cats
I have led a life deprived of cats.
I need their silent paws and glowing eyes.
I need their silky elegant surprise.
In my life cats have rarely sat on mats.
Cats join me when I walk, they seem to know
a feline friend is slinking past their path.
Cats lower legs and pause to greet, mid-bath.
They speak when I arrive and when I go.
My life is made of birds who show me trust.
Each morning birds arrive to share my day.
A cat would lack a feeling for fair play.
One leap and lorikeet would bite the dust.
I know one day a feline acrobat
will caterwaul my last Magnificat.
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- - -
Janet’s notes: “My mother, a farmer’s daughter, was very intelligent. My brother and I have agreed on that fact.
“Like many women of her generation she lived an unfulfilled life of domestic imprisonment, war, depression, another war and disappointment.
“My father’s family were more privileged and my mother was made to feel the gap.
“She was a voracious reader and her inner life was peopled with articulate confrontations with those who made her feel like a Cinderella who had never been invited to the ball. She acted out these dramas in her head but sometimes she would forget I was there and I would be the unintended listener.
“I love cats but my love of wildlife has prevented me from owning one.”
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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.
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