Category: Rituals

For the time it was avant-garde
very
risqué
scandalous, even a little subversive.
Prime time television, late mid – evening
skits and satire
the conservative and the oppressed found it outrageous
and compulsory
an avalanche of complaints to the network and monitoring authority.
Canned
one run series
no reprise with repeats
or reprieve with second instalment
finished, forever.

At the last moment, of the last show
the MC,
creator
performer
and zeitgeist
spoke –
“many have written to complain
about content
theme
costumes
and language
especially the language,
well, at least I didn’t say fuck.”

Banks were common then –
even a small cluster of shops usually had one, sometimes two
big employers – school leavers and returning women
women, lots of young women on the counters.
She looked like she put on her complexion every morning
unblemished by time, stress or ultraviolet
and the uniform of the city’s most prevalent bank.
Even in prescribed clothes she looked like the girl next door
or high school sweetheart.

Every morning for a year –
we both caught the same bus, from the same place
after a couple months she smiled
after a couple more she said good morning
after a couple more she said hello
and a couple more, hi.

Each morning I resolved …. to ask
then it always seemed better to wait … until the next day –
definitely,
for almost a year.
After the summer vacation I decided
first day absolutely no procrastination – just out with it
she wasn’t there, or ever again.

Every Sunday we would go to our grandparents,
all of us,
mother and father and five children,
all very young.
The kids made a token effort at calm
and etiquette
which untangled to running around,
playing pickup, or tag, or fighting.

Our parents had tasks – undertaken dutifully,
solemnly.
Mum would arrange the flowers and do a little
wiping and cleaning.
My father clipped the grass edges
and swept the concrete.
Occasionally we would be told to lessen the noise
and show some respect.
We could only have been there 20 or 30 minutes
but seemed a very long time in the quiet of the cemetery.