Cathy Altmann - lacrimae rerum

Cathy Altmann ’s first collection, Circumnavigation (Poetica Christi Press, 2014), won the FAW Anne Elder Award. Her second collection, things we know without naming (Poetica Christi Press), was published in 2018. She is a poet from Melbourne, Australia, whose poems have appeared in journals, anthologies and on trains. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing on poetry and cancer, and teaches English and Latin. ‘lacrimae rerum’ was written at the height of Melbourne’s lockdown in 2020.

Iacrimae rerum

Close of day. The cloud trails its grey edge over the city, over the road cresting near suburban houses. Trees are silhouetted – more solid than the cloud, which masses in the evening air, a sculpted form of ash and ochre lit with white, like the depths of a distant nebula. It says something in a language I have forgotten, of the pocket handkerchief of grief I hide and twist, of the ashochre pulling through my breast. It collects the tears in things, suspended between the sleeping city and the sky – pulling them from us, holding them in jars to the last of the light.