CAFE POET UPDATE: BRONWYN LOVEL

Australian Poetry has a nation-wide programme of placing poets in cafes (where you often find them, anyway!) where they write and talk with patrons and passers-by about poetry in general and perhaps their own poetry. I'm not sure how many projects are going at the moment, but here's a delightful report from Bronwyn Lovel at http://www.australianpoetry.org/blog/2011/07/21/cafe-poet-update-bronwyn-lovell-kinfolk-cafe/

I wrote a prose poem recently after having a coffee with another mature-age poet. It is appearing soon in a new chapbook from Mulla Mulla Press (details later). I can't format it like I want it here, but I think you'll get the feel:


PERHAPS

Too much is spoken about illness and medical procedures, too much read into every twitch as sand gathers in the hourglass base.

We sit sipping coffee, mine black for its antioxidant properties, beside young mothers sitting at the next table, prams parked beside their chairs and their babies in their arms, babies wrapped against the autumn breeze in the café courtyard. They are fashionable women, attractive, wearing stylish black and grey, highlighting the white of their breasts as they bare them to feed their babies only weeks old. I am distracted from our talk of travel insurance and such hiccups of aging, distracted not as a young man might be by the beauty of these breasts but by the concept of our lifecycle. Sages are often depicted as old and white-haired with beards flowing down beyond their thorax. Perhaps I know why, perhaps it takes time to ponder things objectively, without the surge of blood, without the wind whistling through wild oats. There’s a lot of ‘perhaps’ in the thinking of an amateur philosopher. I stand and walk back into the café to order another coffee, just to break my thinking, just to get back on track.

Andrew Burke