Lapis Lazuli

i.m. Robert Adamson

I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here,

Through the live-streaming lens,

An unseen absent presence, moved to watch

This gathering of your friends,

And all it comprehends:

Love, praise and memories, your poems of course.

But, I don’t know, what may

Have been most moving in the whole occasion

Was, following that display

Of photographs, the way

Your voice broke in, and there you were on film,

Chatting and answered by

Spinoza (so he’s learned to talk?), with his

Impossibly blue eye

Of lapis lazuli.

The first time that we saw him, Judy wore

Earrings of that same stone,

And Spin perched on her shoulder, where he had

Immediately flown,

To claim them for his own,

Or try to, pecking, jabbing, without success.

And now I think of Yeats

And his determination to believe

That gaiety mitigates,

Indeed transforms our fates,

Beyond the tragic scene on which we stare,

Transfiguring that dread –

An image carved in lapis lazuli

The talisman which fed

The faith he credited.

Not sure I share it, but, while the footage played,

I wanted to comply,

Watching you chat and chuckle with Spinoza –

Brief days before you die –

Eye to glittering eye.

Stephen Edgar

Spinoza (Spin) is a satin bowerbird which Robert Adamson rescued and raised.

Stephen Edgar’s most recent collection is The Strangest Place (Black Pepper, 2020).

Hawkesbury

i.m Robert Adamson

Above the cliff a Brahminy kite circles on an updraught,

holds the scene in the keen, yellow charge of its eyes.

Earlier I watched a sea-eagle ride a disc of air –

then suddenly pull its wings into a deft stoop,

a high-speed dive before it let down its talons like a set

of stevedoring hooks, snatching up a rat lying

in a warm coil of rope on the dock. Perhaps the kite

will take a fish from the water, or another nesting rat.

Now it simply circles, a slow enchantment whose purpose

seems impossible from so very high up. And you are gone,

Robert, from your high place above the water, gone

from the mudflats and the river where your words

conjured a raptor’s view, the Hawkesbury surveyed

with your sharp, rapturous eye. I walk back to the wharf,

a crow calls with a voice of charred gloom. The kite

has drifted away to circle and hunt elsewhere. I watch

crabs on the mudflats work their claws around

mangrove roots pegged out like snorkellers. And I think

of you, Robert, pen in hand, breathing easily – words

angling deeply – poem after poem pulled from the river.

Judith Beveridge

 Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music (Giramondo, 2018).

Robert Adamson, 1943–2022 (photograph by Juno Gemes)