I felt privileged, in 2024, to publish this story in Forty South Tasmania. We’re revisiting the happy memory because the writer, Daniela Tymms, has contributed today’s Poem of the Week. Actually, there are two of them, and they, like Daniela’s wonderfully humane memoir, are set in Penguin. ~Chris Champion, Editor
- Old Doctors’ Residence – the Garden
The crunch of gravel driveway as I trudged
Back home from school in long-gone afternoons.
Japonica, wisteria, all nudged
Along the house. Camellia’s heavy blooms
Of darkest pink and tinged with brown decay
Into the earth they fell. Pittosporum
In sentry row along the lawn would sway
As westerlies blew from the horizon.
And through the paling painted paddock gate
We scampered, leaving schoolday cares behind,
My mother likewise, smiling, couldn’t wait
To reach the beach; the sea restored her mind
And freed the stories, there upon the shore,
Of the golden city where she lived before.
- Old Doctors’ Residence: the Kitchen
It used to be the laundry, they tacked on
A wooden room, onto the solid walled
Old red brick house. My mother saw the sun
Shine streaming in from north, so she installed
Near concrete troughs a benchtop with a view.
She stood, prepared our food and gazed beyond
The paddock fence, dirt road, the one or two
Parked cars, train track, tide in, tide out, the bond
Of fisherman and rowboat out at sea.
Behind her, fridge and oven, and between
The “semi automatic” wash machine:
The kitchen’s where she wanted it to be.
She waves to me as on the beach I play
And to her distant homeland far away.
