When the war begins
Eva is feeding her first daughter, Robin, oat porridge
boiled soft for her infant mouth which drops to an O
at the sight of the spoon, the small pink tongue expectant.
Kim, her son, is running around in the yard
rounding up chooks and shouting at sleepy dogs,
pretending to be a farmer.

Somewhere faraway
a place called Austria is annexed, Poland collapses,
Jews are garrotted and pinioned in ghettos.
With the usual burst of wattle and birdsong
spring arrives in the South-West corner
of Western Australia, which is, Robert Menzies declares,
also at war.

In China the blood has been running
for months, years, is dripping off crusted walls
in tight alleyways, congealing in gutters, and all they hear
in Mt Barker is the crackling cut-and-dried
news on the radio: No Real Cause for Alarm and
Business as Usual and Eva is pregnant
with twins.

Canberra bickers. Two heads and a tangle
of limbs press themselves against Eva’s taut abdomen.
Menzies resigns, Arthur Fadden stretches himself
across forty days, two independents take a short walk
to John Curtin’s government. Labor. “Good,”
says Eva, “no more crawling to London.” Cliff scowls
and rustles the newspaper.

Closer to home
there is rustling through jungle. Impregnable:
word like a fortress falling apart, cracking up into syllables:
did not think the Japs would get here so fast. Footsteps at the door
carry the prospect of carnage. The children rush in
suddenly soft and vulnerable as newborns. Eva cradles the twins.
Disaster is one panicked moment: What if I lose them?

Losing is for other people’s children. Here,
the war is a headache that lasts six years,
tightening sometimes into a deep sense of unease—
a little like standing in the kitchen
waiting for the baby to cry itself out.
Pain that belongs to somebody else.