A Villanelle for 26 January 2018 (Poem)

I always do a bitter-ish villanelle for 26 January, reflecting on the ills of Australia. I started doing them in around 2012 from memory and I always post them.

You can see previous efforts here:
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017

This year's one is concerned mostly with my conviction that changing the date of Australia Day is the first and minimally decent thing this country could do to stop hiding from the reality that 26 January celebrates the beginning of indigenous dispossession and genocide, rather than anything to be actually proud about.

A Villanelle for 26 January 2018

A nation’s day that celebrates a start
of sorts: the first day of the end;
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Denialism is its own dark art
Without owning, nothing here can mend;
A nation’s day that celebrates a start.

And rejection of all others is a part
of the same ill mind that never makes amend
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Fireworks and sausages impart
a triumph, sickly-rooted, of whitewash trend;
A nation’s day that celebrates a start.

There might not even be a way to chart
a better way; but at least let’s not pretend.
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

The truth is stranger, deeper, and more tart
than the fairytales that old white men send.
A nation’s day that celebrates a start,
Blood on the ground, the country’s aching heart.

Month of Poetry #1: A Poem for New Year's Day, 2018

I will definitely not be posting all my Month of Poetry efforts, but I do like to put my New Year's Day poem, so here it is!

A Poem for the New Year, 2018

The new year arrived quietly, while I was almost sleeping;
tucked up against a warm-flush child, her face a mirror of passing dreams
half-smiles and flickering eyelids a semaphore of visions under the skin

The new year: not in coloured skies and disinhibited screaming
but softly, in even breath and the sussuration of trees
between one moment and the next, slipping in under the door

The newborn to replace the dead, as it always does
and the calendar turns over

And we have done this before
and will do this again
and it will, every time, mean both nothing and something:

caught in the human mystery of renewal
the seductive belief in clean pages and blank slates
the mesmerising idea that we, too, can be born fresh

a new self for a new year
forgiven our trespasses, and forgiving those who trespassed against us
here in this year that is granted to us all, every one:
this new-hatched year, with no pain in it yet.

- Kathy, 1/1/18