Judy Johnson

Poetry

Contents
About Judy Johnson ............................................................................................................. 2

In the Midst of Bushfires (summer 2020) ................................................................................ 3

Miniature Boats.................................................................................................................. 5

Whale Songs ...................................................................................................................... 7

John Martin in Newgate Prison ............................................................................................. 9

The Night Watch................................................................................................................ 11

Fifty Acres ........................................................................................................................ 13

Published in UNFURL

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 1

About Judy Johnson

Judy Johnson is an multi-award winning writer who has been publishing her work for over 20
years. She has written five full-length poetry collections, several chapbooks and a novel. Her
verse novel Jack was the result of a mentorship with the late Dorothy Porter. Jack won the
Victorian Premier’s Award for poetry and was a text taught in University of Sydney and
University of Melbourne . She has had writing residencies in Ireland at the Tyrone Guthrie
Centre in County Monaghan, The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Western
Australia, and in many other places. Her interests have always centred around Australian history
and her latest poetry book, Dark Convicts, deals with the life and times of her two First Fleet
African American convict ancestors.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 2

In the Midst of Bushfires (summer 2020)

Outside, the sun

smothered under
the smoke-pink sky
is a ten-watt pearlescent globe.

Despite my glasses
and the energy-saving
portholes of halogen in the ceiling
it’s hard to make out small print.

What I need is in your office,

the non eco-friendly
garage-sale desk lamp
with its starburst inside
the black Da Vinci Code monk’s hood.

On dull days you read by it

(when reading was something
you were able to do).

It fluttered and spat ouija divinations

across the chipboard planks
of your horizontal ark.

(The most beloved books queued up there

two by two, in case one was lost
or loaned and never given back).

Stepping into that room I smell

the not-quite lapsed Catholic in you
in the ash of pyrethrum fumes
from mosquito coils you burned constantly.

And I wonder yet again if it was sublimation

for the swinging thuribles of incense
from your childhood’s High Mass.

I close the door, the desk lamp dangling

in one hand, and in my nose
the ghosts of reward and punishment
smouldering on their Archimedean spiral.

At least dementia has singed off

the last remnants of your religious guilt.

And I have become the reluctant keeper

of your conscience and your books
which were much the same thing.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 3

Some days I’d like to take
those twinned titles
down to the river and drown them

as retribution
for their collective wisdoms
refusing to save the mind
of their Noah.

Other days I would apply a match

to this house and everything in it.

But not this summer

when far too many people already

stand in the charred ruins

of what is left of their lives, wondering

what obeisance they failed to observe.

What preparation could have made

any difference.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 4

Miniature Boats

Impossible to tell from your empty stare what you're thinking.

Your fingers are busy on your lap, knitting and unknitting air

as though vaguely aware of your old skill with sailor knots.

A dozen remote-control catamarans race on the foggy lake

10 metres in front of us. They zigzag around

an orange buoy the size of a tennis ball.

Tacking seems the wrong word for what they do.

There are no temporary stitches unless you count the lake's

many tongues lapping at its wounds to heal them

after the hulls have incised the surface.

The owners of the fleet (all men) stand on shore, controllers

in hand, leaning in the direction they want their craft to go.

This old impulse has a name, echo-phenomena:

half wish fulfilment, half hypnosis.
Or in our case, my love, fully habit, as we have lived
so long together our gestures waltz in mimicry.

At least that’s the way it used to be.

Now you sit on the bench two inches from me

unreadable as an MRI of space.

All I know is what I do, call on the skin-memory in you.

That as-yet un-mauled part that recalls

the many times we lay together length to length

unable to identify seams between us let alone unpick them.

I put my arm around your shoulders and after a lag of five

seconds or so, Dementia lifts enough to allow

the person who once adored me to briefly surface.

An hour later it’s time to go. The race is over.

The fog dispersing. I automatically slow my walk

to your shuffle. Twilight’s spears aim low in the trees.

The diminutive catamarans have all been dried off

and packed away in the little coffins of their boxes.

Headlights of leaving cars hiccough

on the bumpy track to the main road.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 5

Someone laughs behind us and we turn.

Once our eyes would have smiled in sync

over the good-natured joke unfolding near the water's edge.

And afterwards, we’d have gone home

to make love then talk about

the ingenuity of men and their toys.

And I’d tell you my favourite part was near the end
when we were walking to the car, heard a laugh

and turned to see the winner of the race on his

makeshift podium of a milk crate, his thumb

over the opening of a piccolo of champagne.

The way this accountant, plumber, funeral director by weekday

tongue-in-cheek, shook up then fizzed the lightness

of a moment's bubbles over the grass at his feet.

And we’d speculate why the big brains of humans

might down their serious tools long enough

to invent more childlike ways to play.

And you’d go all Oliver Sacks on me

explaining which chemicals are released

what neurons light up when we’re having fun.

But I’d only be half listening, thinking instead

a series of tiny effervescent joys

could leaven the heart, to bear the sorrow

that might descend on any one of our lives.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 6

Whale Songs

What a world, where lotus flowers are ploughed into a field

—Kobayashi Issa

1:
Praise the soft and shadow filter that masks us

as we glide under atmospheric radar.

Praise as pulsing wet we stretch the rubbered light


over our triton backs and at dusk, give in

to the hectic rush of mucous and air


in our blowholes, geysering

the salmon shoals in the sky.


Praise the horizontal swim.

The sudden upturned snout derailing a slippery


thirty-ton train at a leap.

Praise the outlines of our bodies


as we breach, eclipsing the sun,

limned with gold and barnacles,


like eremitic gods emerging

from a dark sabbatical amongst the crusty oysters.


Praise the first word which was suffused

with the mollusc-and-brine


kerthump of emotion and not the dry arithmetic

of meaning. Praise its liquid components,


how they may be sung in a round, over and over,

across the miles, the echolocation of a poem


imbued for remembrance with the qualities of rhyme

and rhyme’s dogged shadow that halves the pulse


at the foam-edge turn of a wave.

Praise the gentle, hissing lace of all repetition,


the ocean’s breathing in and out

and the slow water-test of our engines


at rest and swim, the internal rap

of enormous knuckles, corrugation by corrugation,


down the galvanised tanks of our hearts. … /continues

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 7

Praise upwelling without pretence

as we unravel, sleep-eyed

from the ocean’s misted spool.


Praise the sun’s net-catch of water

that rises on our early morning backs,


slides off in the velvet unrobing of our fall.

But most of all praise our aquatic sense of humour


as we dive, tails hovering

like joke-shop rubber eyebrows.

2:
When we die let us follow the paths of our ancestors,

shoreline pebbles quivering

at the lick of our whale-scented colognes.


When we sink to the ocean floor

let the razorfish twist and turn


the screw of their manic mouths;

let their bodies knot and unknot


in the white bread of our flesh.

Let the fissures of the earth cushion us,


the voice of mourning hiss at midnight

in vents of sulphur. Let the stingrays


have our eyes; the sharks our soft bellies.

Let our skeletons remain unscribbled


by the terrible beauty of scrimshaw,

our white bones shine crystal, clinging


like remoras to the deep.

So be it. Nothing more to know of joy


than its leap. Nothing more of sorrow

than a blue surface left undisturbed,


and over it, the commonplace

fishmarket shriek of gulls.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 8

John Martin in Newgate Prison*

Newgate is poisoned with the effluvia of the sick, the stench of faeces. My readers may judge the
malignity of the place when I assure them … that the leaves of my memorandum book were so
tainted I could not use it before spreading it an hour or two in front of the fire.

—John Howard, pamphleteer and social reformer, 1786

If you are flush you can bribe the warder to conjure


the luxurious stench of the very top floor: a

bare five-hundred unwashed funnelled into a prison

designed for one fifth of that number. If you are flush

you purchase pegs for the nose. You will not often swoon

from the smell in the yard. You will have coal for heating
brooms for sweeping out shit. And a candle for light. If

you are flush you can gamble. Drive down busy pox street

by way of cock alley. Woman or man. No one is


immune to the any-old-hole-will-do-at-a-pinch

-and-a-poke. The spirits flow if you can manage to

ante an asset or two. A gold tooth or the plain

battered sin of your body. The least grubby lobe from


the pitiful lungs of your soul. If you are somewhat

less plumply attired with cash you still may acquire

a patch on the oaked middle-floor. Then splash out on some

fallings of sun under which you may open your mouth


to receive the Lord’s vinegar tumbled from a locked

and barred Heaven above. If you are without means and

have nothing to sell then you lie in the hell of stone-

hold underground. With no daylight the cold freezes raw


 flesh to the hardness of floor. You are not even swine
as swine generally speaking have straw. The weight of your

crimes in the cut of your irons will not be reduced or …/continues

*First of three poems from ‘Black Convicts’ (an exploration of Judy Johnson’s two African American
ancestors, John Martin and John Randall, who, along with nine other ex-slaves, were convicts on the First
Fleet).

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 9

ever removed. Your pathetic lot is a three ha’-
penny loaf and a smidgen of maggoty meat. No

doctors attend. Yet you may find a friend in the treat-

ment Mr John Howard doles out to this evil place.

He has found what we’ve known all along. That above and

beyond the clean beautiful cure of the lowest

scribe’s pen defeating the savage’s sword the brute force

 of Newgate’s more mighty than all. Paying no more real
attention to his words on the page than it does to

our blood scribbled onto its miserable walls.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 10

The Night Watch†

Governor Philip at length determined to select from the convicts, a certain number of persons who
were meant to be of the fairest character for the purpose of forming a nightly watch for the
preservation of public and private property.
—Watkin Tench, Sept 1789

I John Martin dark skin deemed fair character do most


solemnly swear to take the poisoned chalice of my

good behaviour and drink. I resolve to all night long

instead of sink into a well-earned dream visit such

 places as deemed necessary to apprehend those

I discover on the brink of a felony or

 trespass or other misdemeanor. When I catch said

culprits or glean a modicum of suspicious-like

 habits at labour I resolve to turn inside-out



the pockets of that behaviour. I’ll give attention


to entering private dwellings patting down the prone

length of those lawless intentions by way of any

 lawful and equitable measures aforementioned.



 I shall fulfil these duties despite detestation


and being reviled by my fellow convicts. Indeed

the degree to which I am spat on or sworn at as

a traitor and kiss mine arse sycophant. The greater

 extent to which I am hated resented exiled

by my own kind the more assiduous the Powers

That Be will see me attending the chore. So therefore



I relinquish all large and small convenience which


 the camaraderie of my fellow convicts was once

so apt to provide. I shall expect (and receive) no

reward financial or otherwise. No privileges

 …/continues

†Second of three poems from ‘Black Convicts’ (an exploration of Judy Johnson’s two African American
ancestors, John Martin and John Randall, who, along with nine other ex-slaves, were convicts on the First
Fleet).

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 11

extra rations minor comforts compensations for

 my social checkmate. Just the sense of serving the state

of New South Wales within the province of the Greater



Good to tide me over when the frosty poker of


loathing’s jammed up my back side. My award may or may

 not reside in Heaven. Meantime I am stuck with my

lot knowing due diligence won’t mean I may slot in-


 to the ranks of respectable men of the Corp. Just

that negligence whilst employed in this duty shall find

 me swiftly punished to the utmost rigour of the law.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 12

Fifty Acres‡

On 29th November 1792, John Martin, finally pronounced free three years after his sentence had
technically expired, received a land grant of 50 acres at Northern Boundary Farm, near
Parramatta.

This is the measure of what an emancipated


convict is given. Fifty acres of spine-snapping



bush. Eucalypts that scratch the throat of the sky and are

apt to ignite leafy tongues in the heat. Spear grass which



shallow-scythes bare legs to shreds. The fast fangs of venomed


snakes in the closed-up injection of each hollow log.



Those who take up land grants are awarded one single


tomahawk two pigs one hatchet two spades one shovel.



Expectations of being off all stores in eighteen


months. That first dry summer rain fell in the shape of birds



arrested by death in mid-flight. It was that hot. One


hundred and fifteen degrees in the shadows. The ground



like the base of a pot suspended over a fire.


The west wind simmered and smoked with its lid halfway on.



And then flames came across the parched Sydney Town basin

and knocked the top of hell off. Flares galloped through trees with


a million dirty hooves gorged on the leaves then shit black


ash on our heads burped up flares that reached halfway to the



sun its knotted-vein belly hung over us twitching.


We beat fire’s hot breath back from the door and covered all

 …/continues

‡Third of three poems from ‘Black Convicts’ (an exploration of Judy Johnson’s two African American
ancestors, John Martin and John Randall, who, along with nine other ex-slaves, were convicts on the First
Fleet).

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 13

of the windows with damp canvas. Somehow it leapt right

over us. Unbridled unsaddled unreined. Ann and



I stared at each other pulled back from the furnace by


luck and I knew that I was enslaved again. It owned



me. I did not own it. Fifty acres of this harsh



wild-eyed ravenous mane-burnt-to-a-crisp country hard


champing at the bit.

Judy Johnson, unfurl /4 14