[photograph by Cindy Keong]
Cane trains roll on
the threshing floor of
winter — snakes, sweet
husks, all that’s left
of desperate toil.
Hawks’ fevered circles
fill the sky —
the green of imagination
not knowing who’s
eating it alive.
Tag Archives: Contemporary Australian Poetry
Harvest
Filed under poetry
Cassidy Creek
for JC
i.
The creek is a loose tongue.
At night we go down to listen
take off who we are
and step into the moon.
ii.
When there is nowhere left for us
this is where we’ll meet:
past the green fringe of palms
the dark collar of mudflats
past the circle an osprey
makes to its nest.
Here, where the creek unzips
itself from sky.
Filed under poetry
Forrest Beach
Light chooses sand, the bellies of gulls.
Behind the dunes, someone is flying a red kite
a tiny stab in the pale blue.
Three fishermen form a curving shoreline
yellow jackets, bare legs.
The ocean darker under the sun’s fading pressure
air the colour of boiled prawns.
Dusk exhales its last breath
stars puncture through.
The loneliness that closes us, opens us again.
Filed under poetry
Poem on my 42nd Birthday
A morning in late May, when it’s too early
yet to rise and too late for dreaming
I pull on shoes and walk out onto
the street crammed with memories.
They dagger me with their eyes.
And though I do not see them
they come on a cooling breeze
through my shirt, feeling for the heart.
I need then not to remember, or
hunger for the tick of blood:
I want to live as my smallest self
with the sorrow of rocks and the joy
of grasses, unbothered by today.
***
[I spent my 42nd birthday (last Friday) in Blackall, a town that has become part of of my personal mythology. It was the (very) early start, which triggered the opening lines of this poem, and the knowledge that out there, under the biggest sky imaginable, I am invisible, that gave me its ending.]
Filed under poetry
To a Stone
[for Ko Un]
You were thrown from a bridge
left to drown
in what remains of the drought-
stricken river.
Today I find your body
caked in mud
unaware of the violent days ahead:
the tens
hundreds, no thousands of beatings
that reduce
everything we know to sand.
***
[This is another poem I wrote during my weekend in Blackall... it is a hard land, and the people working it are currently doing it very tough. These are the words I found to try and tell a little of their story.]
Filed under poetry
Country Road
Father and son
on opposite sides of the fence
a street dog
lying in the last
square of sun
kitehawk circling
cold closing in.
On the road out of town
a fox
open-mouthed
drained of blood
the sound of dark
rubber tyres
almost gone.
***
[Just one of the visions from my weekend in the big sky country of Blackall]
Filed under poetry
Toddle (part vi)
the afternoon like a fragment
pollen colours the air
in every nose
you grab at mum’s skirt
bare your teeth and beg
for milk
the wind is sweet and rank
always is
the sky a hoarse throat reciting
there is silence after
the hunger in both
your bodies fold
Filed under poetry
Toddle (part v)
You wake in the hour
before dawn, singing a route
through to our autumn room
where we swim
in a humid lake of sleep
each note, more famished
than the last, quickens
my pulse as I kick
from sleep’s shore to reach
you in the tidal dark.
Filed under poetry, Uncategorized
Toddle (part iv)
He toddles slowly up the back path
eyeing off the shade of the mulberry tree
where leaves have been raked
into boy-sized mounds:
ageless and dreaming he throws
himself into the litter
whoops and kicks his legs
lusty and loud as any turkey.
Filed under poetry
