THE GREAT DEPRESSION On the scrubbed deal table there is a single jar of stiff and sugary jam, my grandmother has made from Moreton Bay figs because there is no substitute and they are the kind accident of wild fruits and Spring. The sun in its peculiar path and enigmatic journey will catch the small glass jar and refract slowly through its reds and browns. My father will spread some on what scraps of bread and toast remain down a string of hungry years: economists in time will fix and date and classify, and try to explain by stats and tomes and tables. But licking a sweet-sour spoon of his mother's confection: the sort of skimp and save is known now could ruin the liver and damage the bowel - he is transfixed by brief sunshine, through a jar of jam. |
LIVES FROM A COUNTRY TOWN i. The woman in the bakery has eyes like empty cake tins her skin the colour of dough before baking the breadslicer ate her thumb and she has cooked all of her fingers over and over again her spirit drained into 20 years of getting yeast to rise yet every day the town eats up all that she can make. ii. An old slow-eyed farmer in a sweat rubbed khaki shirt still rolls his cigarette beneath the SERV-WEL shop verandah spits in small damp denominations and talks endlessly of rain sitting in shadows dust beneath his patient grinding boot-heel still powders into light and here he is the final metaphor for life. |
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