Dr Robert James Berry
A collection of poetry...

THE SOUND OF RAIN

recalls home.

My finger,
Writing on the wet window
The same letters our fathers taught us

has moved on,
and sketches the road-side shrine
where a Supreme God resides.

Walking out of doors
Wearing skin leavened by the sun,

My tongue erodes into the
Shrill orient of my neighbours
lolling at the fence,
Who greet me, and ignore me.

With the evening light
Mosquitoes, vampires of the hot season
Rise up,
To sip my sweet foreign blood,

Toads belch to their beloved's,
Fat divas of the drains.

Under a low white moon
The padi sings of its home,

A song that bites sharper than the
Cruel steel knots of this fence.

THE THOUGHT OF ISLANDS

The despairing song of waves 
The echoing thought of islands

Brings me where dusty winds whirl like dervishes,
Where Allah commands 'Thou Shalt Nots'
>From sun-stricken minarets.

The women in purdah I know,
Dry as Old Testament verses,

The idle, burned street vendors
Who keep faith with only their flied produce,

and the foundered ships off Quay Street,
Like desecrated carcasses in the stinking mud
Bitten by sand flies and tides.

When God has swept the furnace of this sky
and his sun haemorrhages over the sea,
Only then the betel palms shall sway slowly

And the final remains of a dead empire 
Pedal its trishaw down Beach Street,
Waving generous good-byes. 

Tonight an unlikely rainbow has settled over home.

FIRE

Most of winter
The meanness of snow
tangles in your soul.

The rancour of brambles,
not resurrection,
takes root in my skull.

Decomposing in the black earth of the bone yard behind,
The saints can't save such fat souls as us.

Eternity, deaf to our clamour of bells,
To all those bland good byes cut into the 
Monumental cradles of the dead,

Is stubborn, abstinent as this wind.

For such a cruel season, 
I want fire, and the loud yowl of god,

Not my evening candle 
Guttering in its own tawdry sorrow, 
An idiot stump of light.

Surround me with miracle.
I don't want this snow!

NOCTURNE

This land describes a long sand curve
Towards eternity. 

Coast, that waves have thought over
And wiped clean,
Where no one walks
Save a seldom, strenuous seabird.

Look inland. That world is a pool of ink.
On the nocturnal shoulders of the world, 
Black firs observe an everlasting silence.

Safer is our fishing town that clings to the shore, 
like a young marsupial to its mother.

>From the green beacon that is the harbour light,
A shag is hanging two pterodactyl wings to dry,
Grey sentry, dishevelled seafarer,
Watching the night drop anchor.

Away on the seaboard 
Squid boats burn like vesper candles,
Gone to fish a wide school of stars,

Sailing the telescope of a sea-
captain sharp as a skerry,
Stood at the bow windows of the retired sailors' home,

A poet who plays with creation
As he paints the ocean indigo,
Building the dark like a cairn.

CLOUDS

have many tales to tell
To the lime-edged indigo hills 
They spread their stories

They say in summer
The Sun burns like a Cyclops eye
and the sky is brash as zinc

Their season is winter
When they swell like the crania of gods
Filling the horizon
Scud like royal galleons in their own empire
Blotting out the sun

Some clouds scowl and grumble
Hurl lightning like the ancients, pent with anger
Throw sleet hard as marble
or cry a river

Others are quiet as philosophers guarding their secret
The sky's lambs

Certain and unfolding
Various as the stars
Clouds stir forgotten senses
Like the smell of frangipani
or the ocean's salt taste

Conceived where seahorses sire great waves
Their young race up from the gulf
Grown tall as Goliaths
Ready for war

When no breezes blow
They are patient
As our parents were
The sky is their hammock

But always when summer comes
They mourn a lost paradise

and are aloof and cool as cirrus
Their noses high in the sky

PRECIOUS STONES

Cold islands entice me,
like carved stone cathedrals.
Their single mountains are the
Exalted white saviours of our continent.
Fallen devils in winter.

Go South, where long archipelagoes
Follow the land's evolution,
Isles like shed, splintered tails in the sea,
Giant's vertebrae planted for war.
This is a horizon smudged by storm and salt.

The furnace of tropical islands evokes
other memories. Wild orchids swaying slowly.
Heavy, fragrant, ocean-scented fruit. Taut sails
in emerald twilight. The purge and bloodbath
of sunset.

Yet the old whale tooth amulet,
and the bright scarlet flower of the flame tree
Are essentially one. Only latitudes change.

Looked for on the horizon,
Islands lodge in sleep, conceive myths,
Are emeralds in all the world's languages.

CHURCH MUSIC

The mellow grief of darkened altar-pieces
Jangles its witchery of gifts.

Candles waver under the raised fist of the pulpit
and all the stones are sufficiently changed.

Sabbath flowers, still virile with colour
Wait at the confessional boxes, imitating tarnished frowns.

Outside, the street's loneliness roars uneasily.

I cast my grave stained shadow
across the sad hands of time. 
Above me,
Mother Mary's perpetual help
Thickens with dust,

With the raw pledges of the wounded,
Who have now forgot her.

Should God lean down from the organ loft,
Lit by a hung moon,
And walk, maestoso, among the dry dirge of the traffic

Then I should pray.

STONE CRADLES

I am thinking of the cemeteried dead
Who fill the hillside.

Always I am aware of their broken homes
slumping but not quite effaced by the high hedges.

Even in blackness empty as widowhood,
There is a vulgarity in death,
The discomfort of their silence.

In more articulate starlight
Headstones show their best profiles,
but still all their grand sentimental words
resemble each other.

New bones erode over old blood.
That is the culture, the tongue
of death.

As first snowflakes
Settle on the long lashes
of the gravedigger's starlit eyes

and the mourners ebb off, divide like
tributaries, into the living

I am left standing, clutching the
lonely, sad hands of my dead.