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Poem

Dear god-herd, golden god-horde, Lord / Protectors of the meek and green-fed: / when we came in from the cold / ten thousand winters back, the terms ...

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When I read there were 170 women / seized from brothels in the Gardenia / district, loaded into police wagons / and crammed into the hull of a ship, / I wonder if they held hands. Or prayed.

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All morning, I read about Christian mystics. After a long bath, I wear a caftan and silver ring. / Intolerable hours of waiting for you. I plunge my hands in ice water. // The sun is red and low when I meet you by the fountain. Houses on steep hills light up. You speak / to me with your deep voice like a man hammering in a forge. I thrill at the sound like a dog ...

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Smoke softens the trees, a swift omen scented before seen. / It warps what it brings, from the sun to grief. // I stir on the stoop I rent. All around me wasps shimmy, / Orange alphabet of knives. I call them father and son ...

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In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche. / A flowering wreath buzzes around his head – ...

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'Having mastered the art of using magnets / in discretionary acts / like making a pencil / float above a table ...'

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'The world closed in, but it was fortunate / there was her own interior to explore: / the prayer books a captain might have read / on long voyages, now small with gossamer pages ...'

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Day flicks its cards, laconic. / Even in April, a flamboyance of colour: / stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves / drift away one by one, like concert-goers ...

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Diamond Beach        

Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, trampling
The footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach,
Into the flat refusal of the gale,
Squinting into a distance we would fail,
Surely, ever to reach ...

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On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen,
saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’s
Mt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South Tarawa ...

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