Michelle Cahill- Goan-Anglo-Indian

 Michelle Cahill

Michelle Cahill is Goan-Anglo-Indian writer who lives with her family and two minilop rabbits in Sydney. Her poems and short stories have recently appeared in Southerly, Poetry Review (UK), Cordite, Prosopisia and Fox Chase Review (USA).  Vishvarūpa, her most recent collection is published by 5Islands Press. For a sequence of her poems she received the Val Vallis Award, and she was highly commended in the Blake Poetry Prize.

Some of her poems

The Fire Eaters

Agni, did you come from lightning, sticky lava,
from dry, incendiary leaves or the sun’s hot coals?

Long ago, in the middle Pleistocene, our fingers rubbed fire
our compact homo sapien jaws ate warm flesh.

Worshippers, we stood up straight, to grip your spear.
How did we germinate these fields?  Bonfires slaked you,

from the alchemy of brimstone and chalcedony sparks.
So temples shattered, so firearms and explosives broke

the great sleeping Buddhas of Ghandhara. We live in hope—
your seven tongues draw fire, dividing symbiotic flames

from air. Gums blister, lips kiss the burning world
goodbye, high on vapours, on singed skin and keratin.

The centuries drag. Our cartels breach the Orinocco,
the salt domes and Babylonian Mosques, unsympathetic

to prehistoric algae, the plankton time asphyxiates. Viscera
are stripped from tidy fossil beds, our pipelines carve

 your thermal subjects. Nothing much survives: daughters turn
against fathers. Refineries melt, nuclear plants leak

apologetic isotopes. Yet, sunset converts our gestures
to atonement prepared from rice, cow dung, clarified ghee.

And somewhere with Promethean guile, a man wakes his lover
from her apartment as a light snow dusts the city streets.

In his arms, a two-litre soda bottle filled with gasoline,
on the pavement, a dropped cigarette ignites your flint.

Indra’s Net

I have not found your idol in any temple, Lord.
Your one thousand eyes elude me in sleep, your
net of pearls shimmering like pins, a flower sutra.

Yet how the Vedic skies praise your light.
Spear fisherman and hunter, each knot you tie
interweaving memory, a reef with a rosebud.

Bowlines and clove hitches are your fetters, all
the lace and twine of this world, the emptiness
it frames, uncharted. Your past might be a silk road

of gold, hemp, musk, caravans loaded with spice,
slaves traded. In my conjuring there are far colonies,
papyrus treaties, gold coins, pierced and printed

with your cognate deities: Thor of old Norse, Zeus,
whose thunder you whet, Bacchus, the soma-drinking
foreigner. Zoroastrian or Armenian, your polyglot

perplexes linguists with a strange loop of origin.
Like Escher’s Drawing Hands you are a paradox
to muzzle me. Water nymphs grace your cloud court,

a half-horse, a man with a bird’s wing, his fibula
inscribed with runes. Even the jade and dewpond
are small miracles, selfless things inventing selves.

Charles Dickens Weeps for His Last Child

Beyond the coach, the open reaches of the Thames summons
ravens, gulls, otters, and the Sussex docked at Gravesend.

Mothers fiddle with their baskets and bonnets, children herd
cattle and goats, undaunted by din, the rank, soggy earth.

Autumn with her rich unleaving of oak, elm and maple
measures my bleakness. For days the wind has refused to speak.

My youngest, Plorn, waits in a boarding house with his dog,
his armoury of rifles, revolvers, saddles and family portraits

which will decorate the saloon. But when the fiddler plays a shanty,
when the sails are unfurled, the anchor raised out of mud

that other world begins with its nautical discipline. So remote
from landfall or the idleness of London, strange things can happen.

My advice is to write furiously in the evenings as Wilkins Micawber
— while shooting seagulls you may become your own fiction.

I’m fascinated by the arc of falling stars, eclipses, the way words
permit the undertow of shipwreck, gambling, child mortality.

I grieve for this farewell, to which myself is tethered, as letters
tied to pieces of coal are flung aboard a home-bound craft;

the voyage south to Melbourne both searing and cold. How still
the ocean is, a perfect fleet of ships, the distance quite imaginary.


Beauty Tips
                         for my mother
What words to fill the day? How to resist sentiment,
balancing dream and the recklessly blue sky?

Spring arrives with its allegro swell of trees, pollen,
a novel open on the kitchen bench, breakfast aromas.

Outside, the garden languors in laundry, agapanthus,
our swimming pool in need of chlorine turns emerald green

with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth?
I dip the soft sable in powder to dust away speckles,

cover shadows on my face, and yesterday’s mascara.
Cleanse, tone, exfoliate. At all times, brush downwards.

I’ve disregarded my mother’s beauty tips, her lessons
in permanence or grace. Her body slow, involuntary;

her eyes widened by Parkinson’s, a fine tremor in the jaw
while the heart arranges, steady with belief and forgetting.

I take comfort in this. Mother, show me the other way back.
How the gravel is imprinted by the wind, by human steps.
Walk with me this evening, the sky crepuscular, rose-tinted,
the drifting scent of wild freesias like something strange,

half-known. You shuffle, sight weakened, wanting
to observe the fallen shingles, twigs, and the scarcity of birds.