Midsummer Ice
The second of three poems Les Murray wrote in memory of his mother, who died in his childhood. It is always worth stopping for a moment and reading a stanza or two of great poetry. Poems distill ideas, help us to see life from new perspectives and, I hope, make us more humane.
"A doorstop of numbed creek water the colour of tears but you don’t remember. I will have to die before you remember."
Midsummer Ice
Remember how I used
to carry ice in from the road
for the ice chest, half running,
the white rectangle clamped in bare hands
the only utter cold
in all those summer paddocks?
How, swaying, I’d hurry it inside
en bloc and watering, with the butter
and the wrapped bread precarious on top of it?
“Poor Leslie,” you would say,
“your hands are cold as charity – “
You made me take the barrow
but uphill it was heavy.
We’d not tongs, and a bag
would have soaked and bumped, off balance.
I loved to eat the ice,
chip it out with the butcher knife’s grey steel.
It stopped good things rotting
and it had a strange comb at its heart,
a splintered horizon rife with zero pearls.
But you don’t remember.
A doorstop of numbed creek water the colour of tears
but you don’t remember.
I will have to die before you remember.
Les A Murray