Acanthus Variations by Rebecca Cheers
Acanthus rots at the tile’s edge
like verdigris, up through the basket’s open
weave. The basket she once took to gather
nettles at the roadside, now
it only gathers hunger
and the things she left behind:
collected grief-mad by her mother, pins
and rags and baby teeth
and a thick roof tile for shelter
and in headstone shadow acanthus knits
itself a thicket, metastasises
memory, keeps quiet and safe
what it erases.
But if one skull is a memento
mori, many skulls are mass
death. There’s no basket
that can carry this. Rip five-point
honours from their epaulettes, let
their gold floss fray, gather
the picked-clean skulls
in armfuls, bind them
to the sigils of what took them:
let empires memorialise
what they love, keep grudges
like a garden. Let the acanthi feed
on the indigestible.
make its hundred plump tongues lovely
watch them choke.
Italicised text from de Medici, eX, cited in The 5th Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006). Seear, L. and Raffel, S. (eds). Queensland Art Gallery. 74.
Image: eX de MEDICI United spectres #3 (2) 2006 etching QUT Art Collection. Purchased 2009.