Poem: Afternoon Elegy

Afternoon Elegy

For Robyn Mathison, 1938–2025:

‘Where will memory be / when my body leaves?’

What else could I do

but walk across the top of the hill in the winter light,

late at 4 p.m. while the sunset cast

its pink and purple softness

over the hills across the river

and bejewelled the windows facing west.

The river a blue grey liquid sheet, stretched

from the western shore where stood your Quiet House

full of your things,

to the eastern shore where you died in the nursing home,

the grief of eight months after the stroke, laid to rest.

Dear friend, to respond to the message

about your death, I looked for words

kind, precise, appropriate

to the dignified and determined manner

in which you lived your life,

and the respectful way you used words

to speak to others or tell a story or write a poem.

And then as the bearer of sad news

I chose a compassionate but unsentimental tone.

Not to rush the sadness but to honour its truth.

All written in emails.

I kept returning to the original one

to check that what I’d read was true.

You never took to emails, mobiles, even answering machines,

phone calls on the landline, yes,

but you resisted their interruption.

Solidly grounded in the twentieth century,

you wrote hundreds of letters and cards

in your old school script

with news, birthday greetings, condolences.

I still expect to see you on your way to the post office

or at the café on the corner where you sat

with your back to the window.

Anne Collins is a poet, prose writer and editor based in Hobart. Fuller details of her and her work can be found here. Robyn Mathison, who Anne’s poem is about today, lived in Hobart for fifty years. A writer of poetry, stories and reviews, she saw publication in journals and anthologies in Australia, the UK and Japan. She was the Fellowship of Australian Writers Tasmania (FAW) secretary, a key member of the Society of Women Writers Tasmania (SWW), and was seen as a stalwart of the Tasmanian literary community overall. She co-edited anthologies of Tasmanian writing for FAW, and published her own collections of poetry. The annual FAW Tasmania Robyn Mathison Open Poetry Award, was established in her honour.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.