You’re carrying her ashes, a cardboard urn in a paper bag.
You don’t know yet if you can release them – if you can
bear to put your hand into the cylinder, feel bone-grit stick
to your fingers. You don’t know yet if you can watch the coarse
grey particles sink to the bay’s silt. Your mother as sediment.
You follow the canal, high tide, the water brimming, a glint
of ripples flowing quickly through the culvert. Mid-summer,
the heat siphons the air from your lungs. You walk around
the park, sweat in your hair, your mouth tastes of sawdust.
A heron, so still as if it’s posing for a photograph before a small
breeze flues it skywards. For months the urn sat in your room,
you couldn’t bear to gaze at it, closed your eyes whenever
you walked past. You know it’s not her, just ash from the coffin,
her fire-pulverised bones – but you can barely carry the urn’s
weight, and you don’t know how you’ll feel if you open the lid
and hold some of the ashes in your hand, if the breeze will carry
some away, if you’re ready to let them fall like heavy confetti
from the bridge, or if, once again, you’ll carry the urn home.
…
Judith Beveridge lives in Sydney on Wallumedegal land. She has published eight books of poetry; her latest, Tintinnabulum, was short-listed for the UK Laurel Prize and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She was poetry editor of Meanjin for 10 years and has recently joined the editorial team of The Marrow. In 2025 she received Creative Australia’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Image credit: David Clode/Unsplash