Poem of the Week

#poemoftheweek is “It is Certainly Yesterday” taken from the Arc prose poetry Anthology 2022, and winner of Arc Poetry Prize 2022, Autumn. It is written by an Australian author Lucy Alexander. Here we see in narrative tone past tucked in postmodernism, effusing out.

Metaphors are eye-catching in words, they know how to knit visual fixation. 

Lucy Alexander

I t is Certainly Yesterday

It is certainly yesterday because the fig tree is naked now, the ground is smothered with yellow wiltings topped with fuzzy frost. Each excited child brings sabres of ice from water bowls and puddles leaving them to liquefy like ideation on the floor. In the nubs of the branches, just where the leaves were released, pulling them in and down I put my eye against the new folds the tree intends for spring. It is certainly yesterday when the whomping cold bruises us with arctic promise. Summer’s figs will never ripen.

Yesterday I remind my mother that the currency changed in 1966. She sits on a green cane woven chair, the velour flummoxed by her bones. She talks to me from out of time. Not even the names of her beloved dogs act as avenues to return her - as if somehow through saying them (Ninus Moon, Boy Jasper, Queilie, Sambo, Birri, Izzi) I could call her home: act as an antidote to the sabred plaques and severed tangles.

Yesterday in 1966 – when she had the green scarf and left for London on a boat –

and lost or misplaced that ten pound note.