Two Poems
Janet Kenny

Father’s Ghost

My father’s ghost is hardly there at all.

Younger than me, unconfident yet brave.

He’s straining, for the camera, to be tall.

A country boy determined to behave.

This photograph is not the man I knew,

and yet there is some part of me; a bond

of fellowship, an existential view,

that makes me feel exceptionally fond.

Respectability and family name

were his inheritance although he’d rather

climb mountains, swim and dance, he let them tame

him in the town. They roped and tied my father.

He lost the road less travelled and became

the innocent from whom I took my name.

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Janet’s notes: “The shock of realising a parent had another life before we met him.”

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Schroedinger’s Cat

The question that bothers me is, am I there?

Nobody is certain, and no one knows where.

I may be inside a demountable case,

a pause for reflection, a great loss of face.

I think so I am, which is where the truth’s at.

I’m no sort of sham, I’m Schroedinger’s cat.

My paws are amorphous and so are my claws.

I used to be able to vanish through doors.

I started to doubt me when mirrors reflected

a space where I once was when I was detected.

I wander unseen whether daytime or night

and my visible absence still gives me a fright.

I need to be stroked by a real human hand

and a little affection for me would be grand.

A lonely and loveless philosopher’s game.

I’m weightless and soundless despite of my name.

He calls me by his name, I don’t even own

a decent respectable name of my own.

If I upped and went the old fool wouldn’t know.

When they ask “Is he here?” he replies “Yes and no”.

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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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Two Poems Janet Kenny

Two Poems
Janet Kenny