Poem
Sweet nothings in our ear
cherub pumpkin dearest chuck
but to the heart which is the better
listener the password
to a tongue that only two in their comings
and goings have access to
A blessed mouthfu ...
You can't see water beyond the highway hoardings, but you are told Jesus walked on it. This
is your best clue. Dinner settings, security doors, Viagra and tractor parts flash past like
signed miracles.
But you feel something pull, not daintily at your sleeve, but with tidal will,
a blood rush of stark equations of space and gravity you cannot hope to solve.
When ...
States of Poetry 2016 - New South Wales | 'Visitation on Myrtle Street' by David Malouf
I was woken at some hour
of darkness before dawn by a scent so heavy
on my senses, on the room, that I was convinced
a burglar had broken in
and was loitering
upstairs or in the hallway, or having caught
my step on the stairs above him was lying low
in the laundry, or sitting
upright and unbreathing
in one of the Windsor chairs, unaware it w ...
Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were brought to Melbourne in 1839 by the protector of Aborigines, George Robinson, to 'civilise' the Victorian Aborigines. In late 1841, the two men and three women stole two guns and waged a six-week guerilla-style campaign in the Dandenongs and on the Mornington Peninsula, burning stations and killing two sealers. They were charged with murder ...
The storm blows you back
its funnel ardent
its wide hungry eye
Its tongue croons you
onto flatline of prairie
When poppies drowsed you
red breath drew
gravity into your limbs:
you yearned for tall ...
Distance
(after Jordie Albiston’s ‘Cartography’)
What is the space between this hut and that mountain
but impenetrable black, and frosty cold.
She is writing this at a table in the cabin,
spinning thoughts like threads, as if they can hold
her boys tighter, pull the mountain in, with their bold
tents blooming like flowe ...
'The Book of Interdictions' by A. Frances Johnson | States of Poetry Vic - Series One
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come ...
Song of Solomon, Verse 11-12
Tow
Lo, the cell phone sleeps in its cell.
The raven deactivates the horizon.
There is water for everyone,
bu ...
The dawn is only a thought.
The fulcrum on which we rest our newsprint, our toothless fingerprints, our balmy Paxil days.
Only a thought of the windy, dwindling kind.
Wake to urgent messages, to the waltz of hours crisp and fragile as thin pastry. To roulette of lightning yes. Of arid no.
&nb ...
The particulars of the evening being, whether consciously
evoked or – 'a great shemozzle'
as Kent said –
merely one day washing over and into the depths
& ...
The ‘greate fyshe’, terrible
colossus, dark cathedral of days
and nights, arrests
lost Jonah in his flight. Three
days and nights spent
in wet earnest pray ...