The hallstand my grandmother carved is the colour
of ironbark honey.  Even unpolished,
it is deep and rich.

                    The lid of its storage box
is densely decorated with the large
hand-like leaves of Kurrajong trees
and the split canoes of their ripening pods,
each one pearled with its own cargo of seeds.
 

                            We used to sit there as children—
but now, our ageing heaviness is a threat
to the fragility of this thing, this crafted past
that must outlive us.

                     For forty years after my grandmother died,
my grandfather’s Light Horse hat (with emu feathers)
always hung on one hook, a stilled shelter
for any restless, or reading child.

In the dissolving of the family house,
I don’t know where it went.

                              I open the lid now and find
the present tumbled over the past.  Old photographs
rebirthed on the Epson Multifunction Tardis
plugged in nearby.  Old newspapers wrapping
shed tally books for shearers, repurposed
to record tennis match scores—a happy auditing
of local get-togethers, several paddocks away
at neighbours’ ant-bed courts …

            Here’s my old racquet too—
the handle still welcoming, silken
like the inside of a lost glove.

And someone else’s
with so many shattered strings
a face could almost pass through.

           When I clean the hallstand with Orange Oil,
there are so many knobbly ridges and dainty knots
chiseled up, then swoops into valleys
where my grandmother had to find smoothness.

Polishing this history takes patience …
I travel at the slow speed
of a ripening seed—

my hand gloved in the slow cloth, nestled
in the carved open hands of Kurrajongs,
the closest I may ever get to being back
in that silenced time.

JEAN KENT

From The Shadow Box (Pitt Street Poetry, 2023)