Filling the Emptiness

Andrew Lansdown

WA Poets Publishing
(Perth, Western Australia), 2025

Paperback, 127 pages

ISBN: 9781923100084

BACK COVER BLURP

I have enjoyed reading this collection. So much of it is what I think of as quintessential Andrew Lansdown: charming, accessible, humane, and thoughtful, with fresh and delightful vignettes from every day life.

—Jean Kent

Four Poems from Filling the Emptiness

Filling the Emptiness

i
Even a bamboo
can only take emptiness
in little doses …
In the stem the nodes divide
the void into compartments.

ii
A white wafer
hidden in the dark hollow
of the bamboo—
a summons to communion
with the one who put it there.

iii
Empty lockets
are locked in the bamboo stem
at every node—
saw them free and fill them up
with portraits of ones you love.

© Andrew Lansdown

Sapporo Snow

………i
In the leafless tree
every forked twig is holding
a morsel of snow.

………ii
Nestled in a nest
built and abandoned by kites—
the broody snow.

………iii
Like sin swaggering
in a celestial landscape—
a crow in the snow.

………iv
In the stripped maple—
dangling seeds and hawfinches
and sachets of snow.

………v
When did it come, go—
the deer that during the night
left tracks in the snow?

© Andrew Lansdown

Miseshime: The Lesson

i.m. the Christians martyrs of Kyoto, 7 October 1619

Into nine wagons the fifty-two
were loaded to be paraded
along the streets of Kyoto
to the banks of the Kamogawa
studded with firewood and crosses.

Heading the convoy, a herald
hollered the crime and the decree:
‘By the Shogun’s command
these people shall be burned,
burned for being Kirishitans!’

And, as if to vindicate
the crier and his master,
the condemned confirmed their guilt,
shouting out in response
(oh, brace my unbrave heart):

‘This is true! We die for Jesus!
Hurrah for Jesus!’—their voices
juddering from the shuddering
of the wooden-wheeled wagons
as the oxen hauled them

to the foreshore where the faggots
stood ravenous for flame and flesh.

Bats

There are mites moving in the fur
of the pygmy bat whose radar
went awry and sent it slamming

into the windscreen of my car
as it hurtled down the darkness
of the wandoo-lined country road.

I unlatch its membrane wing snagged
in the windscreen wiper, a wing
black as the wiper’s blade is black,

and touch with one finger the fur,
the downy-soft mousey-grey fur
still warm on the cooling body.

And I think of the vampire bats,
the blood-lapping bats of Peru,
whose skins the Quechua stitched into

a cloak for the Sapa Inca,
their son-of-the-sun-god sovereign,
whom the Spanish conquistadors

captured but let keep his women
and his clothes, including a strange
stately cloak that claimed countless bats

whose patchworked pelts, the astonished
Spaniards said, were ‘softer than silk’,
a cloak that could not protect him

from their gold-greed or their garrot.