One trolley bag
Loaded with books
Is hauled onto the bus.
She sits silently.
Dark hair frames
Her unlined face.
She is starkly beautiful
As though chiseled by her knowledge.
Nearby
Sits a ‘western Sydney’ child bride
With her tousled babes
Desperately young and burdened.
The pram clutters the crowded walkway.
Stress flows
From her stance, her eyes
From her silent sighs.
The burden of fecundity
Splodges her body
With the spidery ingress
Of vague tension lines.
Her maternal plumpness
Is cheeringly opaque
In its ‘perfick’ charm
Lush against the purple gash of her hipster pants.
Did she choose this life
Or did the boyfriend’s
Condomless thrill
Briefly flicker
And then snuff out
Education’s hope
Work’s achievements
And time for her own dreams reviving?
The other goddess looks ahead
Severely fixated
On the road’s inexorable tread.
Education’s crisp mistress
Attired in leather boots
And tight jeans
Holds in thrall a calm frisson
Against her gaunt alabaster body.
In my sight
Both young girls
In charge of their lives in different ways.
What regret, over time will they allow to surface
When career and motherhood
Brings its own weariness
When expectations and intimations
Rise up to invoke a certain class of failure?
Are we born for regret
Or is the targeted trajectory
Folded neatly
Within the deep surrender
Of falling
Into the blindfolded mysteries
As straight as this road
Given the velocity of acceptance?
Both women
Etch their survival and difference
On my flickering eyes:
Two metrically different lives
Their parallel seating
On this public highway
Provokes the yin and yang of choice
And its wild declension.
They might yet arrive at the same point
Of playful weariness
And loves acceptance.
For life unravels
Its pinched glories and consequences
With starting irregularity.
Or does the unutterably unfocused
Always break on socio-economic lines?
Gar Jones: January 2017
Loaded with books
Is hauled onto the bus.
She sits silently.
Dark hair frames
Her unlined face.
She is starkly beautiful
As though chiseled by her knowledge.
Nearby
Sits a ‘western Sydney’ child bride
With her tousled babes
Desperately young and burdened.
The pram clutters the crowded walkway.
Stress flows
From her stance, her eyes
From her silent sighs.
The burden of fecundity
Splodges her body
With the spidery ingress
Of vague tension lines.
Her maternal plumpness
Is cheeringly opaque
In its ‘perfick’ charm
Lush against the purple gash of her hipster pants.
Did she choose this life
Or did the boyfriend’s
Condomless thrill
Briefly flicker
And then snuff out
Education’s hope
Work’s achievements
And time for her own dreams reviving?
The other goddess looks ahead
Severely fixated
On the road’s inexorable tread.
Education’s crisp mistress
Attired in leather boots
And tight jeans
Holds in thrall a calm frisson
Against her gaunt alabaster body.
In my sight
Both young girls
In charge of their lives in different ways.
What regret, over time will they allow to surface
When career and motherhood
Brings its own weariness
When expectations and intimations
Rise up to invoke a certain class of failure?
Are we born for regret
Or is the targeted trajectory
Folded neatly
Within the deep surrender
Of falling
Into the blindfolded mysteries
As straight as this road
Given the velocity of acceptance?
Both women
Etch their survival and difference
On my flickering eyes:
Two metrically different lives
Their parallel seating
On this public highway
Provokes the yin and yang of choice
And its wild declension.
They might yet arrive at the same point
Of playful weariness
And loves acceptance.
For life unravels
Its pinched glories and consequences
With starting irregularity.
Or does the unutterably unfocused
Always break on socio-economic lines?
Gar Jones: January 2017