Mother Who Gave Me Life

Archive, #23 Puncture, #23 Poetry / By
Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong’s poetry has appeared in numerous Australian and overseas literary journals, most recently K’in, Backstory and Authora as well as Plumwood Mountain, Griffith Review and regularly in Cordite. Armstrong was runner up in the Judith Wright Overland Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Writers in 2015 and received an ASA Emerging Writers Mentorship for her poetry manuscript The Watershed, which was published as a chapbook in 2017. Armstrong is currently involved as poet for The White Bluff Project an artist-led collaborative project exploring ‘place’ with particular reference to the effects of climate and urbanization on a coastal ecosystem. Raised on the stolen lands of the Gumbaynggir people, Armstrong currently resides in lutriwita.
This is a still life collage poem set on a digital photograph. Taking up the top centre third of the photograph, a crumpled Mother can lies on a bed of damp twigs, mossy rocks and grass. The ‘Mother’ text on the can forms part of the title of the poem. The rest of the poem runs scattered down the page from the Mother can. Some of the lines of the poem are physically cut pieces of paper with text on them, and some parts of the poem have been digitally inserted. The poem reads: Mother Who Gave Me Life. Forgive me the wisdom I would not learn from you. For choosing this high caffeine content fugue; its vainglorious tune. Mocking the anguish of seasons burning backward in time to all our other sins. Each of my nearly thirty thousand days: a divertimento to this forest’s bird flutes and frog babble. I prayed you would live to see the sun die, sing its final rushing whiteness, not needing me to request it affettuoso. Tender, passionate, still good to the last, like my grandmother striking her upright piano, singing old ballads from beyond. Lost thresholds of ice, rock, fire. It is not for my children I walk here today. It is for you, for the wild chance of repentance sung by sudden rain and wind piping through these thin throated she-oaks.

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