Heartprints: A series of portraits
Jannali Jones (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)
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Sister:
You sit on straying lines,
Holding much and little,
Leaning on a shared load.
I watch your creation of landscape,
An artist’s roadmap in time,
And know your shadow’s by my side.
Brown Egg:
Too much shell, too little flesh.
You appeared in frozen sand dunes.
Drew me from my own egg
To turn my voice into another’s.
I’m waiting at the tide’s edge
As your figure disappears
Into the horizon.
My Heart:
You hold a tilted mirror
Within which blinks a phoenix
Singing louder than my taloned voice.
You raise me higher than my height
Even when it hurts my head.
I want to draw you a snowy sunrise
But my green eyes know your circle
Of hearts, hands and smiles.
Whipped Cream:
An angelic breath
Gliding lighting across the earth.
Your radiance draws moths and dragonflies,
Wasps and butterflies.
I wave to you in a sea of faces,
My movements drowned by the mist,
And see now from afar
Your intangible, flawed perfection.
Man Of A Name:
Strength tempered by a heart
That softens our divide.
Your patience draws me up
A whispered reflection; intersecting;
Drawn to a shelter built,
An unnamed, tactile home.
I’m listening for Tea’s ticking
Against the maelstrom behind the glass
But your future memory haunts me
As if these moments have already passed.
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Jannali Jones was a 2011 Young Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Overland, Southerly and Etchings Indigenous.