Baptism

Paul Hetherington

Baptism

 
 
The word ‘baptism’ reminded him how his mother had set him forth at the surf lifesaving club when he was nine, to wallow in cold waves and sprint on sand towards string, to find his body flailing against its limits, to pick himself up over and over again. She never entirely had him back, after being entered by wind,  cudgelled and thrown, finding a rough-structured way of being, taken into tumult and surge. The dousings were powerful as he learned to face himself newly, sometimes like a clumsy gull, sometimes like a trickling wind, sometimes like the glancing sun. Words emptied from his mouth. He was thrillingly, gaspingly dumb.
 
 
 
 

Paul Hetherington has published 13 collections of poetry and prose poetry—including, most recently, Moonlight on Oleander: Prose Poems (UWAP, 2018). He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for poetry and was shortlisted for the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. He heads the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, where he is also Professor of Writing.