Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

States of Poetry Series Three

LesleyLebcowiczLesley Lebkowicz has been publishing poetry since the early 1980s. Her last book, The Petrov Poems (Pitt Street Poetry), won a Canberra Critics’ Circle award, was shortlisted for the 2014 ACT Book of the ...

Stories, whispery voice
Mooda-Gutta!
Warning sign, stampede horse.
Mooda-Gutta!
Water spout ... sounds like petrol on fire –
Don’t cross there! Mooda-Gutta
Don’t say it aloud,
Whisper ‘Mooda-Gutta’.

Paul Collis

...

(For my sister, Joanne)

Slowly the days pass.
Buses, cars, bikes
all roll away, away.
She is gone, down a shady street in shiny shoes.
Way above, vapour trails burn the sky
and way below, scars burn the land.
She screams, but I can’t hear.
In another street, the new suits,
suit themselves, and colours burn red and gold.
Noisy bastards. Shu ...

(for Satendra)

 

What happened to me

What did I do to deserve that?

I don’t want to be old person.

I’m buggered now, poor fulla me, done, old, like dust.

I should go to doctor, and ask him a question.

He said, ‘Only thing worse than getting old, is not.’
Wise man, Doctor. He’s like light. His eyes know. They see into me ...

Yo!

Whitefullas got no cult-charr!
– Only me
With my arm fulla tatts, up my sleeve.

– Only Us Mob!
Only us
Got cult-charr.

Don’t tell me! I lived it, man. Us bruvas, we live it –
Everyday man. We fuken live it.
Blak and Proud. Deadly, un’a?

Always was
Always will be
ABORIGINAL LAND.

Colonisation i ...

I’d become …
just a public pain.
Did I make you, just a little
… sick?
Make me your vampire, then –
your time.
Take my neck.
Dig deep with kisses.
Let’s feel the swirl of blood.
A country boy on Country is a power difference-making ...
Spirit flying time with eagles – where everything’s clear.
I’ll never be clear.
Not i ...

A Barkindji man, born by the Darling River in Bourke, far north-west New South Wales, Paul is an emerging writer and poet, who works at the University of Canberra, teaching creative writing. Paul holds a PhD in cultural theory and creative writing. Dancing Home, his first novel, won the national 2016 ...

... (read more)

Well, I have now reached the end of the States of Poetry (ACT) mini-anthologies, accompanied by delight and privilege in having been able to showcase something of the poetry where I live, as well as regrets that I couldn’t include a lot more poets. Eighteen out of more than fifty (at a conservative count) ...

... (read more)
Page 4 of 4