“Between Birdsong and Nothing” by Nod Ghosh — A Tuesday Feature
Between Birdsong and Nothing
The lizard-skinned woman from the candy cane house hugged wine in her
hands and cried,
− there are no birds
− the birds have gone
In fading light, through earth-roar tremors, we smoked like bad weather and
drank like drowned pigs. Bill boiled malevolent water on a wood stove, flashed
his bottom for fun, while we assembled jigsaws of sound. And waited.
No whio, no fantail, no warbler, no tern. No chaffinch or sparrow.
Instead, the urgency of the radio, and a distant thud-crunch of masonry
as it tumbled. Our hearts plunged in unison.
The infinite gap between swooping cries and airborne chatter was palpable
with dust-tinged fingers. An avian multitude drawn to submission, detached
from trembling ground, like stalks in a spring-child’s grasp.
When they returned, cranes had claimed the sky. The incongruous song of
birds dripped through the atmosphere like sticky juice.
© Nod Ghosh
.
Published in Leaving The Red Zone: Poem from the Canterbury Earthquakes,
ed. James Norcliffe and Joanna Preston, Clerestory Press, 2016
Reproduced on “…Anything, Really” with permission.
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Earlier in the year I featured the release of Leaving the Red Zone, an anthology of poetry to commemorate the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 – 2011 and their aftermath.
The sixth anniversary of the first earthquake on September 4, 2010, recently slipped by without fanfare here on “…Anything, Really”. This is not because either the earthquakes or all that followed, and is still ongoing, have ceased to matter, but simply because sometimes even a writer may run out of words when a topic runs so deep.
That does not mean, however, that words do not exist — and so when Nod Ghosh sent me a number of potential poems for today’s feature and I reread Between Birdsong and Nothing, I was struck again by how well it “spoke” to the events of September 4 and the series of major earthquakes that followed, from September 4, 2010, to 23 December, 2011.
The poem captures the mix of shock and dislocation, and the juxtaposition of the real and surreal that characterised that “18 months of awful.”
I also like that Between Birdsong and Nothing offers no platitudes, yet the sense of change is profound: “When they returned, cranes had claimed the sky.” A change in which the song of birds has become “incongruous.” In this simple concluding stanza, Nod Ghosh may have captured an integral aspect of the geography of loss that has characterised Christchurch during the past six years.
~ Helen Lowe
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About the Poet:
Nod Ghosh lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, and completed a creative writing course at the Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2014. Nod is currently an associate editor for Flash Frontier. Her short stories and poems appear in various New Zealand and international publications. To find out more about Nod and her work, visit her website: http://www.nodghosh.com/