States of Poetry WA
Once upon a time the crocodile was a human being. And then one day, one particular day his heart became hard and when his heart became harder, his flesh became hard and when his flesh became harder his skin became hard, and when his skin became harder it transformed into the scales on his back, deeply cut wounds that have never been healed.
He developed a taste for blood, he ripped open ...
Poet and painter Edwin Lee Mulligan was born in Derby in 1980. He is also known by his traditional name, Warrda Lumbadij Bundajarrdi. He grew up in Yakanarra and now resides in Noonkanbah in the central Kimberley and in Broome. His grandfather Jimmy Pike is a well-known Walmajarri artist and is the reason why ...
... (read more)'Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni, Malta' by Annamaria Weldon | States of Poetry WA - Series Two
I went where she reigned
far underground, deeper
than roots, in rooms hollowed
by hand and bone, where curved walls
contained my breath like lungs.
Passageways opened onto chambers
honeycombed in stone
...
While women scanned the horizon, fishers
and hunters tended their nets, someone
etched the Lapwing crown-plumes in clay.
Abandoning hunger and
its frozen ground, they soar
South with the Grigale wind
Middle Sea harbingers of the
Lampuki-fish moon, its halo
a herald of autumn rains.
Outlines, incisions quicken those
plo ...
'in the National Museum of Maltese Archaeology' by Annamaria Weldon | States of Poetry WA - Series Two
We met at the Neolithic display. I was staring
at the loom-weights, suspended in a glass case.
Handcarved stones, smaller than seashells
a tell-tale hole bored through their middle. That’s when
I noticed you, uncanny yet not out of place
holding a loom-weight. You seemed at home with fibre
your fingers felt its tensions, slack or taut,
sensitive to tex ...
Alabaster: such a beautiful word for silence.
Neolithic Venus, was translucence eloquent
enough when stone was our mother tongue?
Yellow-throated crocus were strewn
at your feet, they fed you honey
and broad beans. Worship swelled
your breasts and fertile belly, men lived
without weapons, women were weavers
and potters crowned in cowrie shells
Annamaria Weldon’s writing residency with Symbiotica UWA prompted the poems, essays, and photographs of Yalgorup National Park in her last book, The Lake’s Apprentice
Archipelago, sleeping goddess whose body
we trample as tourists take selfies, bored lovers
seek mystery, stray dogs piss on temple stones.
Inside the sanctuary walls, torba floors endure
their bone-white ground broken as the silence
now deities are curios, gift shop souvenirs.
Asphodel and Sea-squill bloom in the corners of ruins
strewn like footnotes to ...
the text read:
Kissing you under an umbrella in rain
makes my list of favourite things;
a lunch crowd streamed around us.
we, dry in a cylinder,
sealed with that old golf umbrella’s
nylon night sky far from city lights –
I don’t recall why I didn’t walk you.
maybe the rain put its hands in pockets,
whistled east on Murray St ...
you opt for form over colour
makeup smudged lenses
pale bare planes by the lakes;
a cygnet ellipsis in black
parenthetical necks;
white sky reflected in high water.
we sit where I have stayed
and watched an oak open and close –
green again – the bench
suspended on ampersands.
Chris Arnold
...