Rattle by Maureen Hynes
by Steven McCabe
There’s a new rattle in the wind, a new texture to what blows
around the continents. Spinifex bushes dot the outback’s
blowing sand, its slopes and hollows. Mixed in with red
sandstorm dust: gum wrappers, foil bags, plastic water bottles,
empty tinnies. In the old days, says the Uluru guide, the desert
and its people were self-sufficient – what they discarded
enriched the land. A second Gonwanda is emerging, the mid-
Pacific Gyre’s garbage patch, mirror to the four thousand pieces
of space flotsam hurtling through the stars. Daily I trouble myself
with the household’s petty excess, jam jars and junk mail,
a bag from every airport I’ve visited. I carry twenty unmatched
lids and eight containers to the bin, the half-life of glass
nearing that of plutonium. Why not create something of value
with all this carboniferous energy? Yesterday a thick grey
cloudbank was towed across the evening sky by a thousand
invisible strongmen hauling in the snowstorm, obscuring
the sunset. I have finally decided that my preference is cremation.
Maureen Hynes is a past winner of the Gerald Lampert Award and the Petra Kenney Poetry Award (England). She has published three books of poetry, Harm’s Way, Rough Skin, and the most recent, Marrow, Willow from Pedlar Press. Maureen is poetry editor for Our Times magazine. http://www.maureenhynes.com
I modified a photograph from Wikipedia Commons (in images 3, 4, and 6) of descending stone stairs in the ruins of Vlotho castle, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, posted by Wiki user Tubs, GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
poemimage 
This poem took my breath away, Steven, and your images haunt me….both monolithic and macroscopic…but ultimately hopeful. I’ve come back many times to have another look.
Visually, I was introduced to the traumatic response of “Indifference” by journeying down a long, unending staircase. It was the most frightening of the archetypes that I experienced. I’ve been working on a way to express the insight and have been at a loss on how to translate it in its fullness. Your fourth image sure comes close…
Since healing is entirely individual, I assumed that the visual aspect of the archetypes was also a personal one…each person having a spin on them uniquely their own. But art is full of them.
This incredible poem is an anthem for the plague of indifference and you have illustrated this so intuitively… I’m heartened and in awe…
Jana
Hi Jana, So glad to hear your thoughts about the poem and the visual art. I appreciate how you look into things and see from multiple perspectives (as each hour is different than another hour).
Your thoughts about archetypes is quite interesting. The ‘indifference of the gods’ comes to mind. But we are talking survival of the species aren’t we? I’ve always thought this indifference we see in action was a suicide-wish of patriarchy.
But I wasn’t expressing this in the visuals. Not that I know. Maybe.
It would be interesting to hear Maureen address the idea of the
poem being an anthem.
I’m glad you feel there is a hopefulness.
Maybe I’m like a fool too busy playing tricks to face reality.
The poem somehow to me mirrored our planet in orbit. The way it’s all put. I feel I was responding to the motion of the sound as much as the ideas expressed.
Thanks again!
“The poem somehow to me mirrored our planet in orbit. The way it’s all put. I feel I was responding to the motion of the sound as much as the ideas expressed.”
You describe an important aspect of oral tradition here Steven…one that I wonder if poetry…even as just words on a page read silently, mirrors in rhythm within the body.
As do line, form, color., flat on a page. .. often time carrying more depth than what we hold to be concrete evidence.
I really have enjoyed this post…!
Maureen’s poem is amazing – so right for the times. And your images are a brilliant match – shifting spaces, depths and focus. A really rich combination – I hope Maureen gets to see this.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for these reflections about the poem and the images. One does something visual intuitively and then a thought brings the process into sharp relief and this insight is revealing. Much appreciated. I’ve invited Maureen to visit and contribute to comments and I’m sure she will. As you say it is a poem that addresses our times fully and in a most intriguing manner.
Thanks to both Richard and Jana for those thoughtful comments and responses to the poem. What I loved about Steven’s images was what I saw as the centrality of an “eye” throughout them — there’s a kind of foreboding and dread throughout the poem, and to me, the eye is both taking in those responses as well as expressing them. Watchfulness, a good stance for us in this era (in the hope that it leads to action, of course); and of course it is somehow opposite to “indifference.”
The way Steven’s images followed the poem’s movement through land and water was lovely, too – and for me the staircase image took me deeper into the earth and into the seabed, toward the earth’s core.
And I am supposing that what I saw as the “eye” is what Steven saw as the planet in orbit — and I loved, Jana, your seeing the monolithic and the microscopic in the images.
An anthem against indifference? I am so honoured by this reading of the poem; that interpretation moves it past the station of dread to engagement and determination, in some ways. Or so I see it.
And yes, I do think our bodies engage when we read poems, even when we are still and silent — to mirror or modify our breathing, heartbeat, eyeblinks. It’s the process of fully entering the poem, and letting the poem enter us.
As Steven does so beautifully with his wonderful repertoire of poems.
Thanks again to you all.
Thank you Maureen. Such rich food for thought.
Terrible and beautiful. Hope and hopelessness.
‘Daily I trouble myself’. Yes, yes…
The responses are as wonderful as your work, Maureen and Steven! Fantastic.
Love what you add to the discussion Karen. thank you.