Some of you know Rebecca Rushbrook. She is one of our local Poets and she also lost everything she and her children own in the Lismore floods. I read this on her page and it filled my heart. Thanks Bec for these wonderful words. 
Bec’s week: After last week, that never paused, a weekend performing at Nimbin, working late on Monday and then sitting up later trying to nut out my half hour presentation and workshops for Wednesday & Thursday, I woke up on Tuesday morning after 5 hrs of sleep in a nest of the notes I’d been making. Threw some clothes in a suitcase and left Lismore in a disorganised hurry, dropped off Finnegan at Bec’s in Alstonville (thanks Bec), then realised I’d forgotten my phone charger and went back to Lismore before taking off on a different route to the one I’d planned. Drove to Armidale on autopilot planning my presentation and workshops in my head, but still wasn’t happy with them when I got there and sat up in my motel room til 10.30 when I felt like I had them sorted. Went to bed, oh, hi insomnia, lay there til 2.30 before I slept. Eesh.
Arrive at TAS at 8.20 on Wednesday morning as my scruffy self in my dirty, scruffy car that still has the wrecker’s number on the side of the new door I just replaced the scrunched door with, which doesn’t exactly match. The school looks like Hogwarts. I half expect to be asked to leave. The kids are all so shiny and well groomed that I feel like their parents wouldn’t like me talking to them. I meet the Head of Creative Arts who is also very shiny and well-groomed and head to where I’m presenting to the Year 8s. It’s an actual theatre. I’m a public school girl with public school kids. I’ve never seen anything like this place.
But thankfully I’m here to talk about poetry and I can always talk about poetry, so I do. I give my presentation and perform some poems. 3 teachers come up afterwards and tell me they love different poems I’d peformed and ask if I have a book they can buy (I really need to sort out a book). So I figure that bit went ok. Then it’s time to start the workshop rotations. I’ve never done this before. I’ve got an hour and a half to get these kids to write a performable poem. I very rarely write a performable poem that fast and I’ve been writing for years.
I play them some youtube clips of other poets, perform a bit more of my stuff, talking about how it works, and then get them to splurgh for 5 minutes with anything that comes out of their heads. Stop them. Get them to tell me a word or a phrase that stands out from what they’ve written. Get them to try turning that idea into a poem and wander around from kid to kid helping them to shape their work into something with form and to find what they want to say.
There was self doubt and resistance. But eventually it started to happen in every rotation. Hilarious raps, memories, desires, stream of consciousness imagery – and it’s a boarding school, so a whole lot of heartbreaking stuff about missing home. One boy was totally adamant he had nothing. I made him write about how he had nothing. Came back to him not expecting much and found the greatest poem showing the way an ADD mind jumps around and the desperate wait for meds to kick in. I felt pretty great by the end of the day – I’d watched them make some really meaningful stuff they were proud of. I felt like I’d helped something special happen.
On Thursday there was the last rotation. One of the girls is writing a poem about the colour black as a place she hides in. There’s a bit in the poem about me, that I’m wearing black, that I’m not hiding like her, that I’m strong and beautiful. Wow, really? Me? After the last rotation the kids get to decide which of their 4 rotations – poetry, theatre, band or art – they want to return to to get something ready to perform or exhibit. I’m not sure how it will go, because writing a poem is really different to having to stand up on your own in front of parents and peers and perform what you’ve written, especially when you could be safe in a group. I’m expecting to come in at No. 4 and I do for lots of them. But I get 8 kids.
8 is good with me, we’ve got 2.5 hours to get performable pieces ready and rehearsed. The kids show up and immediately tell me they can’t perform their pieces. I tell them not to worry about that right now, let’s just work on how we could do it. We read the pieces to each other. One of the girls has lost her poem and has to write it again. One boy wasn’t at school the day before and has to come up with something from scratch. We swap and read each other’s pieces. I teach them how to pause and let their lines fall, how to hit their beats, how to find which parts aren’t working. One girl has a language disability and I can hardly hear her so I work with her some more.
Pizza gets delivered. The kids are getting their poems down, replacing lines, encouraging each other. Robyn asks me how I manage to be a poet and work and raise 3 kids. I tell her my house is very messy. We get a chance to go and practice with the microphone. They want another try but half way through we have to leave cos the parents are arriving. It’s time to go on.
I sit in front of the kids in the front row so they can talk right to me. There are theatre pieces. Slapstick. A band. But my kids are just going to be by themselves behind the mic. I pass them chocolate. They are so bloody brave. I’ve never been so in anyone’s words as I am now. Not the greatest performance poets I’ve seen. These kids are in Year 8. They’ve gone from not thinking they could even write a poem to performing it on their own. There’s a poem about what is anything and what is nothing, a poem about wanting a decent AFL side to play with and sticking with the dream. A poem about loving and hating the father who’s left. My girl who has language problems delivers her poem about looking at the picture of a clown on the wall and feeling like a clown. About how clowns just perform and don’t care what anyone thinks but she always cares. She doesn’t rush and mumble, she holds her space and lets her words out. Gavin, who wrote that day, does his piece about dreaming of his home in Hong Kong. There’s so much in it. I tell him after that he has books in him and he tells me he knows.
Then it’s Izzy’s turn. She has written some beautiful lines. Her poem is about waiting for rain. About her father so tired, working so hard, going away fighting fires when he should be on the land because there’s so much to do. That the rain is here now. Izzy has told me about her dad. He committed suicide before the rain came. This poem is huge for her. She hasn’t broken down once but in the last lines of performing she starts to come apart. Tries to go on. Comes apart. I get up on stage and put my arm around her, help her shaking hand hold her page, tell her we’ll do it together. She gets through it to a thunder of applause. Then Robyn. Who has written the standout poem of the group about her Omi who is dying and how she can’t talk to her on the phone and she knows she should but if she doesn’t maybe its not real. She blows everyone away.
After, the kids are glowing. Robyn’s mum comes to me crying saying she didn’t know Robyn could do that. The kids keep saying thank you. They hug me. Kids who didn’t come back to perform come back to talk to me. One tells me how they really enjoyed the class and the performers were amazing. I feel amazing, except I really don’t want to leave the kids now. It’s been the best 2 days. The Head of Creative Arts walks me back to my car (Oh no! Don’t look at my car!) and tells me they’d love me to come back next year if they do it again.
After, I have my own father moment, visiting my broken dad in his nursing home in Moonbi and then have dinner with my darling aunty and uncle in Tamworth. My uncle is really sick with cancer. I watch them together, full to the brim, as I always am, with the love that is their marriage. Then today I explore Armidale. I find books and records and bits and pieces in the opshops for me and the kids. I get the best coffee I’ve ever had from a cafe with goldfish painted on the side. Then I wander into a vintage shop. It’s full of the most magical furniture. I exclaim in delight to the owner and he tells me he loves me. We get chatting. His name’s Robert. While I’m looking around, he’s googling the news and exclaims that Queen Elizabeth is dead. We talk about that. We talk about why I’m in town and poetry. He tells me I’m a bit wonderful. I tell him we’re both in each others lives forever now because this is the bit we’ll come back to whenever we think about where we were when we heard the Queen died. He tells me he loves me again. I buy a repurposed meat safe to use as a bedside table and pay with some of my Nimbin Poetry Cup prizemoney that I have in an envelope. He’s delighted that that’s what I’m paying with and gives me a big discount. He helps me load my new treasure that I’ve just exchanged my poetry for into the car.
Then I head off home. I sidetrack to visit waterfalls. I listen to the opshop CDs I’ve just bought. I write a poem in my head about a turtle I see. I think about the kids I’ve just taught and my kids. I almost run out of petrol but a magic servo appears. I chat to random travellers. I drive through rainforest and bellbirds. When a big grey kangaroo appears on the side of the road, I bring the car to a halt and watch him lollop across in front of me. He stops and peers at me through the windscreen and then keeps going, stops again on the other side of the road and turns back to regard me before continuing his own journey. When I reach Grafton, I stop for fresh squeezed orange, pineapple and watermelon juice and through an opshop window I see the perfect winter robe I’ve been looking for for months. They’re closing, but let me come in and buy it. I do the last leg of my trip with the sunset behind me and the full moon in front of me. Now I’m sitting in my messy house with Finnegan sleeping on my foot and planning the next thing – it’s time to assemble my photography brain now. I log in to my bank account to get the bills taken care of and there is enough for everything I need to pay for and it all came from things I’m really proud of doing. I like my life. I’m feeling very happy.