Seen From Above
Janet Kenny

driving to Brisbane

Seen from above, our little yellow car

winding up hilly country gravel roads,

shiny and silly among rough trucks with loads,

must appear inappropriate and bizarre.

Is it, perhaps, the very thing we are?

Lovely, the blend of dust and leaf and wood,

balanced by birdsong and the tractor’s roar;

action and stillness as our spirits soar,

racing the sun before dark shadows could.

Everything, Pangloss said, is for our good.

Blinded by sunset, tree-flashed, into night,

darkness and moonlight up the motorway,

silvered into the city near the bay

sparkling like fireflies flirting with our sight,

over the great black river framed by light.

Seen from above we blend and disappear.

So many stories. Listen, the laughter bursts,

and ricochets off stone walls. Each spirit thirsts

after the gift of somewhere free from fear.

Seen from above this fragile life is dear.

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Published in Barefoot Muse and Janet’s collection This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press)

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Janet’s notes: “We really did make this trip in the little yellow car which I am still driving. The whole journey was magical and the evening entry to Brisbane beside the great river was the perfect finishing touch. It was a steamy summer evening and people were partying outdoors. You could hear the laughter.”

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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.

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Seen From Above Janet Kenny

Seen From Above
Janet Kenny