States of Poetry Poems
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 ...
States of Poetry 2016 - New South Wales | 'Mouse (Wunderkammer)' by Kate Middleton
Cut out a sixth of the heart.
At a day old—furless,
close-eyed, resembling nothing
so much as an infant's thumb—
he can survive it.
The mouse can regrow that missing part
in three short weeks.
Aesop knew it:
to be mouse-hearted
is as good as wearing
the swagger of lion.
His heart
perhaps the size of ...
In black chalk the beast
brusques forward Silence Rubens
has stopped his mouth
with a single line He is already
awed by the den
he will find himself in even now
as his mane curls into wisp
of emptiness A study on paper
But there in white chalk the grim
pose brightens
into ...
1
The sound of shovels scraping
gravel, voices
of men – the night's
heat
clinging still –
Awake to this, or
swimming
yet in sleep
you mumble –
A fly
is walking
on your forehead
2
'Ten thousand women
an ...