Free Smoke Encrypted Whispers by Samuel Wagan Watson Page B

Germany, entropy caught me. Now, the atmosphere of Communist ‘curfews’ are lost, especially when you step into an American-franchise 24-hour service station with 30 gas pumps and microwave tacos. I wanted to taste so much more! Walls and boundaries are the blemishes of our history and the flavour is generic. We are all given band-aids to place over the wounds of our ancestors; used band-aids will be the bookmarks of my history. I was looking for something in Berlin, but a colleague told me I should just relax and have another drink before I go. I’m not going to find it. ‘When the Communists left, they took the barb-wire, they took the missiles, they took the tanks. And the ghosts of our loved ones they had killed.’

snapshots
    On Boundary Street, the police painted the outline of a homeless man’s body on the pavement where it stayed until it was overpowered by the shadow of a stylish townhouse complex
    On a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall, children’s paintings cover a sacred place where artists once risked their lives to paint poetic gestures of defiance
    Fireworks shoot from retired gun-nests in celebration of an infamous bridge and its macabre role during the Cold War
    During a street festival, a group of Aboriginal adults and children welcome strangers to their country, dancing barefoot on the black tarmac of Boundary Street, where only 40 years ago their ancestors would have been shot at.

aunty grey smoke
    On a dank afternoon, an old tribal woman, shrouded in society’s skin, raised a heavy head and shook the silt in Brunswick Street Mall. She peppered a weary audience with a volley of hard moans. Peak-hour traffic was forced into a saunter of whispers. Joe Public don’t know how to relate to tribal people, and now there was one weaving a dreaming-throat at them, almost alien in this occupied land. Sitting in a bar with my eyes closed, I pictured a cloud of red earth spiralling from pursed, deep-purple lips. With my eyes closed, I actually noticed the sudden cackle of crows. Dark birds gathering above, whining along in the grey-cloud drizzle, mimics to the haunting chant of an old tribal woman. ‘Smoke?’ she asked the audience, ‘You got a smoke for me?’ breaking into a howl that fed a low rhythmic pulse. Her eyes swept the domain, and I’m sure, right then, she cursed us all.
    curses touch the sky
    higher than any car horn
    bad moon arising

author’s notes—conclusion
    My bedroom back at my parents’ house is a cemetery for virtual-reality pets. Laptop, palm-top, mini-disc recording equipment, cameras, guitars—all these things that I thought years ago would help me to write ... but no, when you’re in the field all you need is a reliable pen, plenty of notepads and a good dictionary. Maybe I’m still rigging those gadgets trying to catch some whispers?
    Travelling around the place, experiencing the darkness of different hemispheres, I lost my fear of night. Living on the Brisbane River, I can attest that it has its own sirens, like those in the old Greek classics, and their songs at night helped me write and showed me that night can’t sit still on the tide.
    Living back in Tigerland, the only whispers I hear in the night are on the breath of my little boy when he mumbles to the spirits that playfully encroach upon his dreamtime.
    When we smoke the houses that our loved ones have lived in, and say ‘Yenandi’ in the old tongue, we’re not evicting them from this plain, but in the smoke, we’re ensuring their whispers continue the journey beyond ... beyond this secular world.

revolver
    From my balcony I can read a strong poem that the moon has pasted on the river. Everything is quiet. Now and then, a wave breaks the message, temporarily changing the font from bold to italics. The moon in its crescent appearance is the precision blade of a Shaolin warrior. I’m concerned that if I gaze too long, I may