For the first time in history of the Bello Poetry Slam, both the winner and the runner-up were women.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
And they gave powerful, passionate performances that had the crowd clicking their fingers with heartfelt admiration.
First place and people’s choice went to Chalise van Wyngaardt, who finished school at Coffs Senior College in 2014 and moved to Melbourne, where she quickly began making a name for herself on the spoken word scene.
Her poems on Friday night were riveting: beautifully crafted, wise beyond her years, dealing with big themes – the warrior strength of a girl beset by mental illness (‘Like Odysseus’), love that pulls in different directions (‘Return to Sender’), death at the Orlando nightclub massacre (‘Truth is’).
Here is the one she presented first, and below it is a video of her performing her second one.
Like Odysseus
by Chalise van Wyngaardt
Warrior, how long have you been laying there?
I’m surprised you haven’t disappeared under the dust
Or rusted fast to your bedframe.
You know, no matter how long you wither there,
Your mattress springs won’t bamboo their way through you.
What words are scrawled on your wrists? What tallies?
What archaic quotes have you used as replacement for a knife?
God. Something bad happened to you, didn’t it?
The mirror sweats with the vapour of your whispered pleas,
‘Survive, just survive.’
I’ve heard of your trials.
The hyenas laughing while they lay
Their appetites into you,
Your brave silence in the face
Of banshee shrieks,
your slowed breaths to preserve your frame
When food wasn’t an option
on your mind’s barren island.
I’ve heard the Goddess you loved keeps you imprisoned there.
And those lashes. I’ve seen those before.
Lashes of silences,
and un-speech,
un-sleep,
unrecognition,
un-love,
Unfeeling,
un-being,
un-being,
un-being
Until
you wished
To exist
no more
Why is it that undoing does the most damage?
I can see the white frames of your bones;
The last things you will be left with before your body decays.
Oh, love, you’ve made up a mattress sarcophagus in an unwindowed tomb.
When was the last time you left here?
Love, are you listening?
Let these words rest in your ears while you cannot sleep
But cannot wake:
Every dawn will stay dull until you conjure colour in yourself again.
Every dawn will stay dull until you conjure colour in yourself again.
First, draw breath into yourself
Even if you have to gasp in the stale un-wind
And make your own
By exhaling or screaming and realise your red blood is still pumping.
Warrior.
Maker of colours,
Renaissance painter,
Fighter of uncolour
You have destroyed monsters as grey as these days before,
With half the blade.
Don’t you remember the battle of the curtain rail
when lashes just like these ones were whipped upon you by the rope monsters
screaming
JUST DO IT
You cut off their necks
With the sword that splashes colour with every strike
And now that same sword lies on your floor tangled in vines.
Warrior, get up.
You were born for swimming in lakes
And eating apples off the tree,
You were born to paint the world in
And write yourself out
Into poem fragments
That shard into stars.
Up there is the ocean,
And those lights are the glows
Of the creatures in the deepest seas
Finding their way home.
Keep glowing, my love.
Keep shooting to new heights
And know that every time you do,
There will be someone making a wish on you;
Looking out for next time
You appear in your comet swagger
And flare a colour that is so you,
Stargazers will fight over what to name it,
and you will say it is called
Warrior.
Untangle your blade from those pale vines
And emblaze yourself like I know you’ve done before.
Be your own inferno that tempers your own sword
Strong enough to strike open your tomb
And slash every foe that stands in your path
Into a trail of colour that you’ll leave in your wake as you walk to the shore.
Don’t even bother with the Goddess that imprisoned you.
Let her watch as you carve out your canoe
And sail it heroically into the horizon
Like Odysseus,
As those glow-fish stars swim into the morning with you,
And you’ll sing:
Every dawn will stay dull until I conjure my own colour,
Every dawn will stay dull until I conjure my own colour again.
And you will slide your sword into its canvas sheath,
And glide forward.
So get up, Warrior.
Get up.
Michele Balharry
Equally impressive in terms of content, performance skills and audience reaction was Bellingen’s Michele Balharry.
Her first poem, ‘Half-Moon Eyes’, addresses those whose eyes slide past women of a certain age, and it sweeps across landscapes she has lived in, using beautiful metaphors that connect her body to Mother Earth.
Michele was a close runner-up in the Poetry Slam but almost didn’t enter this year, despite getting through to round three in 2017.
“I thought I would just leave it,” she says. “But it wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Michele has been writing poetry “quietly, privately” forever, but it was the encouragement she received from the poets’ group that meets monthly at Alternatives Bookshop that encouraged her first attempt at the Slam three years ago.
With a solid background in performance – dancing, singing, playback theatre – taking to the stage was not the issue.
“The stage is my safe space, in lots of ways,” Michele says. “But I just didn’t have the material. I did not have a poem that I wanted to share.”
Then she was provoked.
“Someone said something. I can’t remember exactly who it was. It just made me think – do you really know who I am? What do you see?”
Michele says the poem is also a message to herself.
“What am I doing? I’m 53, the kids have all left home. And as soon as I get upset that maybe someone else isn’t seeing me, it’s like, all right, so what am I not seeing in myself?
“So the poem started off that way. But then it became kind of a tribute to all the places I’ve lived, that had meaning for me. I’m always fascinated by where people come from and how the landscape informs us. How we’re shaped by where we’ve lived.”
Michele says she did feel nervous about delivering such a personal poem, especially when initially it was greeted by almost complete silence, apart from a groan when she said the line about the “mundane mediocrity of the marriage moulded wife in me”.
“I had absolutely no idea how that poem was being received. I thought the first part was moderately funny, in a self-deprecating kind of way. And there was no response. It wasn’t until the clicking started that I could relax a bit.”
Later, in the toilet queue she was congratulated by a group of women in their 30s, one saying it had moved her to tears and another vehemently affirming that “older women really need to be seen!”
Michele had known going into the Poetry Slam that if she got to through to the third round she would be relying on a lighthearted lullaby about pirates that she’d created for her son Finn over a decade ago (he’s now 17), as she didn’t have anything else to present.
Although it bucked convention for the third round of a Slam, she felt unabashed about sharing the simple joy and delight of a children’s poem.
“People love the poems they remember hearing at bedtime or that they read over and over to their own kids. Why should every poem at a Poetry Slam have to be weighty?”
Half Moon Eyes
© Michele M Balharry, May 2018
When you look this way
Do you see the shape of me?
Do you?
Do you see my curves and swerves, chubby folds and jibbly bits?
Do you see echoes of faded youth, greying hair, and descending tits?
Do you see the mundane mediocrity of the marriage moulded wife in me?
A frumpy lump of hefting flesh, quite often trying not to pee?
Do you see the decades high mound of discarded teabags in the sink?
Do you see my ransacked dragons share of bedroom into which I slink?
Do you see the worst of me, my cowering, twisted, yowling self,
See untidy piles of Self help books on floor, on chairs, on bulging shelf?
Do you see the careless car crasher, the sump smasher, the rider of clutch,
With vacuous vernacular who never says thanks, much
Do you see my ankles clank the aisles of the IGA,
Stuffing my wire belly basket and dreaming of take-away?
Do you see pegging wrists hanging bed sheets and undies?
See my humping back, and arms around my child bearing tendencies?
Do you see the ignorer, the judger, the shammer, the shrew,
the hoarder, the gorger, the silly old Moo
Do you see the shape of me,
Do you?
Have you noticed bushfires on my shoulders, the smouldering ash along my spine?
Do you see my fern gully clavicles; my far horizon fingers flocking past the ridge line?
Do you see billows of half forgotten memories settling on my open palms?
Do you see the cool Kalang River ripple from under my arms,
See the runnels and rapids from my throat to my silver fish thighs
Do you see underwater fronds; glimpse my tail flashing by?
Do you see the shape of me?
Do you see the half Moon rising in my wide sky eyes,
Soft grey moths flop into the night as I sigh,
See my corded battle scars; the victory dances in my crooked toes?
See the cracked sole miles I've travelled along the track as far as it goes?
Do you smell the first drops of rain on my desert knees,
see the small puffs of dust in the Winter breeze?
Can you see the wheat fields of my buttocks, tractor square and churning;
hold my mulga scrub hips while the stubble is burning?
Do you taste light sparkle on my salt pan skin,
see my kookaburra breasts sing to their morning kin?
Do you hear my whispering windy She-Oak hair,
Sense my feather tips turning on the warming air,
Do you see the shape of me?
Stalactites dripping, worn crystals littering my ribs,
Clattering until my scanty bones shake?
My volcano heart that first beat on Booandik country
where my Grandmother lies buried beside the craters Blue Lake,
Story lines coursing through veins connecting me to every soul I'll ever meet,
My ancestors tracks upon my forehead, the Scottish slant of my sea spray cheek?
Do you see the shape drawn through decades, forged in the landscapes and moments of existence...
Do you see … me?
Seven Seas – A Pirate Lullaby
By Finn Stephens & Michele Balharry 2007
I wish I could sail the Seven Seas
and be as free as the salty breeze
I'd work all day and I'd dance all night
as long as I had my Rum in sight
ho, ho, ho-ho-ho
I wish I could sail the Seven Seas
and be as free as the salty breeze
I'd work all day and I'd sew all night
By the light of my candle bright
ho, ho, ho-ho-ho
[quietly]
I wish I could sail the Seven Seas
and be as free as the salty breeze
I'd work all day and I'd sleep all night
wrapped up in my hammock tight
[very quietly]
ho, ho, ho-ho-ho
[ with hearty vigour ]
Oh the winds may roar and the waves may crash
across the deck with a lightning flash
but I will sail on the Seven Seas
and be as free as the Salty Breeze
yes the winds may roar and the waves may crash
across the deck with a lightning flash
but I will sail on the Seven Seas
and be as free as the Salty Breeze
HO, HO, HO-HO-HO