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
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
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
Once I could tell you what lasts:
stone, the pull and suck of tides
the countless acres of sky.
Now I am less certain.
Things do not stay
where they are put. The days spin
and burn out like stars.
What lasts?
I turn as the sun goes down
toward eyes that shine like small moons
and to all love’s senses I am woken.
There is nothing simpler, nothing more lasting than this.
Filed under poetry
We bathe our son
a prayer for every part
as if washing him with song:
hair the colour of oats
slicked back from his face
and the eyes
knowing my mother calls them
bright as finches:
in them is the completeness
of life and love
words that survive silence.
Filed under poetry
for T.H.E
We’ve moved on
every day a little deeper
to a place where moments
are defined by the love in them
a place where another’s breath
could be my own
the profound breath of prayer
and joy is unpronounceable.
Filed under poetry
To follow on from yesterday, here’s a selection of my own haiku from the Karawatha State Forest ginko… the place, the poets and their poems continue to resonate…
[photographs by Cindy Keong]
nature trail
the song of crickets
becomes a stream
*
summer sky
seen through eucalypts
seen through
ants
on the fallen eucalypt
all moving
*
leaves
among them
the lizard’s tail
Filed under poetry
What an incredible day… am cherishing every moment of family time these days and yesterday was something extra special! So with today being the day after Fathers Day and the first day of National Poetry Week, I thought that I would post a new poem for t.h.e nunn along with a photo he had taken with the one and only Robert Adamson (photo by Cindy keong) at last weekend’s QLD Poetry Festival. To all of you lovers of life & poetry, I hope your week is off to a wonderous beginning!
Robert Adamson, t.h.e nunn & this Lost Shark
Thomas and the Fishes
Already he knows the bream, of course;
the flathead – dusky and sand;
the shy silver whiting and leaping mullet;
but he is yet to discover the exotic –
Venus Tuskfish and Harlequin Sweetlip.
In a fishing family, the education
starts early. At bedtime, he slaps at
Grants Guide to Fishes – a bewilderment
of estuarine and pelagic, rock and reef
swimming into his pupils.
In schools and shivers they come
in frys and fevers, gleans
grinds and glides; brightly scaled
nouns of assemblage, lifting
off the page.
And when you close your eyes
that darkest of creatures; the basking
shark, surfaces to scoop you up
in its mouth and carry you
through the deep water of dreams.
Filed under poetry
I ate you quickly. Did not stop to feel your cold
slip and bite. The white stone from inside
your head is shivering in my pocket. I place it
under my tongue to speak the slimy syllables
of a language you thought forgotten. The tinny
music of bone. Now your kind will hear me coming.
Filed under poetry
