Susannah Cosham

Susannah Coshamis a participant in Poetic Portraits, an intergenerational creative project to showcase the creative talent and diverse life experiences of different generations in Monash.

Susannah Cosham is a long-time collector of words and stories. She enjoys writing literary fiction of all lengths and has taught creative writing to children in group workshops as well as one-on-one.

As a school librarian, Susannah believes that letting yourself fall into other people’s stories and learning to examine the distance between the said and the unsaid is key to discovering your own voice.

Daughter

Each recital begins with a sigh. An uncommon name, dictated

by the deliberate spelling on your birth certificate.

Never found on newsagency carousels of plasticky mugs or flimsy door signs—

and definitely not among those brightly coloured, under-stuffed bears

hanging in tidy rows,

superficial uniqueness in a sea of uniformity.

See, there’s a concession over there,

in the back corner. Not a name but a title,

and almost the most generic of all,

shared by half the world. Daughter,

loved while still nameless, born into that first shred of identity

until the name you were given became your own.

And so it’s a bit of a joke—

an embarrassing story of a dusty toy with

name.

But there’s movement among the rough edges.

You find an orange spool, a shade too pale,

and begin to tighten the gaps. Saving the stuffing. Keeping me whole.

And slowly, slowly, with each tug of thread,

the world spins on its axis and slips into place.

The carousels of bears are gone now,

but I remain. The last of my kind.

And now, you lift the gold ribbon,

the homemade scarf that keeps me warm,

trace the visible stitches of love and care—

expose the eight letters embroidered across my chest

and at last see yourself.

Drive

What is it like to grow old? I can only guess

from what I’ve seen of others. Right now I have

more grey hairs than I’d like in my twenties,

less life experience than I expected at ten.

Noisy knees and lines under my eyes are things

I thought would wait until I hit middle age.

Whenever that came. I don’t think about it if I can help it,

don’t think much beyond the next few years.

The stakes seem highest now, just as they did when I was eleven,

when I was fourteen, when I was twenty-one. Will I reach a

plateau? Will I eventually find myself reaching more into the past

and less towards you, that hypothetical perfected myself, with every step?

There’s that vivid, confronting imagery of being over the hill,

of recognising oneself as weaker in body but stronger in spirit—

hopefully—and knowing that what once was can never be again.

I think of the car I bought last week. I, not wanting to be fleeced,

took my father along with me. The dealer said,

It’s eleven years old, but it’ll keep running like new.

If you take care of it. It felt younger, in its low-mileage imported newness,

and I thought of what I’d heard, that even new cars lose value

as soon as you drive them off the lot. But you know how that chapter ends.

I don’t want to know if I have it for fifteen years, or five, or a week. It’s another step

towards independence, towards vulnerability, towards finding that drive

to keep pushing on until the list of Done overtakes the To Do,

until I’m no longer paralysed by being able to do anything but not everything.

But will that ever happen?

If you find out, will you let me know?