Jane Frank
Ouroboros
We’re not afraid
of the serpent.
Our intricate memories,
like lace,
will stretch and hold,
help us navigate
as we ride its curved back
to the horizon.
Grey will turn to white heat,
the green of home just a whisper
like the wash inside a shell.
We’ll shed old skin
among the gum and wattle,
metamorphose into summer,
understand inside out
what it means to be home.
Jane Frank’s poems have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Writ, Antiphon and elsewhere in Australia and the UK. Jane teaches in Humanities at Griffith University in south east Queensland.
Frank writes: “The new lives of emigrants in Australia in the late 1800s were themed by both exile and opportunity; the need to reconfigure and reinvent their identity in a new and strange environment. My poem reflects on cyclicality, recreation and ‘the new dawn’ of life here.”