Organic Sister
“… delightfully condensed … a wild imaginative energy … [Synge] pummels an immense amount into just a few lines. Even the darkest of her poems has an energy and beauty. [Hers] is a voice that celebrates nature, the Muse in her various incarnations, the erotic as it enhances imagination, and the everyday world.”
“The linguistic equivalent of a minimalist work of art.”
A woman’s life story told in poetry and augmented with whimsical ink. The reader is introduced to the poet’s celebration of her life journey by witty Greenfield drawings - for example, a circus tent flying the flag of YES introduces the erotic life, a slightly surreal mother-goddess introduces love-songs and lamentations. Using inventive poetic forms dosed with pathos and humour by turn, Lesley Synge brings the reader revelations of the working life, friendships, chance encounters, and meditations on the spiritual quest. Individual poems in this second collection were first published in literary journals (Blue Dog, Social Alternatives), community newsletters (Birth and Beyond, The Peace Issue), and in anthologies (Taboo Haiku, Small Packages).
“I met artist Donald Greenfield from the Sunshine Coast Hinterland when I lived in Maleny. I lived there with my family of two sons, two dogs, a brood of free-range hens and an organic garden and orchard. (There was one husband for quite some time; but he wasn’t a ‘one-wife’ kind of a guy.) A range of factors impelled me to leave a full-time teaching career to embrace a more creative life. Before long I found myself campaigning against a multi-national company that was intent on locating its concrete manufacturing plant to the flood plain of a river that wended its way through the town. It was a beautiful waterway and a platypus habitat to boot. Apart from a few vested interests in support, the community opposed the plan and contributed to raising the funds essential for legal representation, cakebake by cakebake, raffle by raffle. Greenfield (Nation Review, Bulletin) donated a graphic of a platypus playing an electric guitar to use as a campaign logo. (And yes, after several years of work, we won.) Some time later he posted me what he said was a quirky portrait (Donald Greenfield, Lesley flirting with the clouds and moon, drawing, 2004. By this time I was living a solo life and had sold up to move 100 kms down the track to Brisbane to where, by chance, my publisher had also re-located. I missed Maleny and wrote Organic Sister as my tribute to the life-style one can live in a regional Australian community with an alternative edge: connected, community-oriented and in tune with nature. During the design phase, Post Pressed, the publisher, agreed: Greenfield artwork simply had to go on the cover.”
Originally published in 2005 and currently out-of-print, there are plans for an e-book.
To read an essay about the community campaign known as FABS (Find Another Batching Site), see ‘Keeping a Town Beautiful’ in Other Works - Non-Fiction.
When G Visited from the City
He joked about his worn-out lungs, refusing to stay over with us in case his morning coughing fits alarmed us. In the late afternoon he stood on the veranda smoking, watching me. I came up from the garden laughing, arms full of oranges, mandarins, dark avocados and a pale curvy-necked pumpkin.
Like a character from a P. G. Wodehouse novel, G. reeled about, a man mortally wounded. “The obscenity of Nature! All this fruiting and flowering! A man with my urban sensitivities, subjected to this plethora of productivity! Better watch it, my girl! You’ll get pregnant!
Why is it?
love goes, and leaves me
old as fallen trees
seeds grow, new from old
from forest mould
why is it so?
friends, it is so
it is so
This Woman, This House
My house is fretting now it knows I’m leaving for good. I can’t sleep for its sorrows and anxieties. I gave birth under its roof so it wants me to die here! Incredible! it mutters, your intention to pass winter without warming your white butt at my fireplace, spring without your flowers, summer without your balancing act on the veranda rail, autumn without bonfires.
Every night my house interrogates me. Who will rescue the lizards when they stray inside? You really think someone else will relocate cicada larvae? No-one will free goannas caught in chicken wire, allow rioting parrots the whole persimmon tree, let snakes hibernate and cobwebs drape.
My house likes my rising in the night to slip through its darkness with total familiarity. It likes the way I start the day. It thanks me for the lights I have hung from its ceilings, the Buddhas in every room. It forgives my omissions – a window frame unpainted, a hole unplugged. Nearly twenty years, us two, it chides. The weddings, the children who dropped cake, the parties! That boozy noisy phase was fun then you gave up meat and took to crying all alone. That too had to be done… I understand. I know you...
I start to explain. Your dreams? it interrupts. The tea-room? The zendo? You’re walking away from everything? I sense its hysteria rising, a readiness to bring forth ghosts. As midnight surrenders to dawn, we minister to each other, this woman, this house.
