Poem

Three bluetongues reside in our steep bush garden
of sandstone ledges and the stumps of fallen trees.
One is content to doze under a rock while around her
everyone chatters; one lost the pointy end of its tail

Her mother remembers how in the end
she died of third-degree burns from a kitchen fire,
and she can’t get over it, the cup of tea
her daughter made her every day

The springing point was where they took off from,
where the impost, set on good footings,
joined the arch and assured its leap and span
of water’s being there yet flowing on.

Nothing is whiter,
like clouds with the sun inside them.
Nothing is smoother,
like clouds and the moon beside them.

I was reading a poem in that upstairs sunlit room
when I looked up and thought I saw you, Harry,
standing beside the window across from the apartment
where laundry hung outside like a fireman’s ladder snaking

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – now open to all poets writing in English – is one of our most prestigious prizes of its kind. Read this year’s four shortlisted poems.

You are seething; I am worried.
We have read the Greek myths.

This anger of yours feels like
a distant thunderclap