Anne Casey
Evensong
Half a lifetime ago,
I sat goggle-eyed through
a wayang shadow-puppet show
in Surakarta—enraptured
by the spectacle, only part
-picking up its threads.
Slanting pink-gold
these past evenings
through the autumn-thinning mantle
of our backyard trees, edging
between moth-eaten monstera fronds,
fading cornets of the clivia, curling lace of tree ferns,
across distant eucalypts
waltzing to a stiffening breeze,
dusk-lit silhouettes are full of stories:
this nightly theatre backlighting the invisible
threads that have pulled us through
our days—
new-born squalls,
tricycle spills, first readers,
high school exams, gratitudes alongside
acceptances of losses, almost twenty anniversaries—
and I am frozen looking out;
twin moon-bright saucer-eyes:
a ring-tail piggy-backing her joey
past our window pauses, a cacophony
of kookaburras is silenced in the boughs,
and I wonder:
Was this the beginning
of worship millennia ago—where
we found the faith to carry us through
the shadow-world to whatever might lie ahead?
All the while,
the clatter and rush
of people going home
or heading out, fewer
overhead than before:
a reminder we can take nothing
for granted
as the light drops,
half the planet rotating away
from what sustains us,
the dog’s ears stiffening
for a single engine sound.
Anne Casey is an Irish poet/writer living in Australia and author of five poetry collections. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for 30 years, her work ranks in The Irish Times’ Most Read and is widely published and anthologised internationally. Anne has won literary prizes in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the 2021 iWoman Global Award for Literature. A law graduate from UCD, she is the recipient of an Australian Government Scholarship and a bursary for her PhD examining The Second-Wave Impact in Australia of the Great Irish Famine at the University of Technology Sydney.
Website: anne-casey.com Twitter: @1annecasey.