December 2021
Selectors
Peter Jeffrey OAM and Veronica Lake
Contributors
Anil
A Fishmas Carol
Ananda Barton
Climate Change Summer
Peter Burges
A question of love and two asps
Ode to a Vanilla Slice
Gillian Clark
The Burns
Gary Colombo De Piazzi
Soft as Clouds
Dust In the Eye
Derek Fenton
I Complain
Ann Gilchrist
Road to Uluru
Grandfather’s Garden
Kevin Gillam
in the end
out here
Candy Gordon
Shifting Tides
Mike Greenacre
Fairy Tales
SJ Griffin
Fruit
Her heart is a graveyard filled with our bones
Ruari Jack Hughes
Hallow’en
The Silence of the Poets
Glen Hunting
Old Friend
To A Young Admirer
Jackson
Trigger
Ross Jackson
At Jackadder Lake
Jarrahdale story
Peter Knight
How now the dodo
Veronica Lake
Every Little Girl’s Delight
Richard Lawson
This day weighs heavy
Geoffrey Lilburne
Low Ebb
Mardi May
Intention
Scott-Patrick-Mitchell
we are haunted by property prices
Jan Napier
Mourning Light
Shucked Oysters Die
Julian O’Dea
Backyard
Virginia O’Keeffe
Honeyjoys
Allan Padgett
Letter from Willie
Chris Palazzolo
Kimberly Thumbnail Sketches
Yvonne G Patterson
kids no one hears
Jaya Penelope
deep
Gregory Piko
Rise & Fall
Barry Sanbrook
Lollipops and Bombs
1864
Laurie Smith
Another Folio
SoulReserve
Down River Bend Road
Geoff Spencer
clôture
liberosis
Amanda Spooner
My Grandmother
Kaelin Stemmler
Open garden
Melissa Tapper
Pandemic Mind
____________________________________________
A Fishmas Carol
Portrait
Ebenezer Cod
has turned from God
to give a nod
to get-rich plod.
This path he’s trod
as mean tightwad
and boring clod
sans accolade.
*The full parody will appear in Anil’s 2022 book, 101 Animal Universes (Olympia, UK).
Anil
Back to Top
_______________________________
Climate Change Summer (Manjimup)
For the past few days
It has been trying to rain.
Heavy bellied clouds
Pregnant with rain
Float over our valley.
The air is hot, humid,
Half an hour’s work
And your shirt
Sticks to your back.
A few drops,
But no rain.
Meanwhile,
ABC Landline
Talk of bushfire and drought
Camera panning across
Stands of dead ironbarks
A few shrivelled leaves
Still holding on.
Boorloo / Perth 9th March 2021
Ananda Barton
Back to Top
____________________________________
A Question of love and two asps
Is it possible that famed asp
while nipping Cleopatra’s child-
like and much siphoned breast
was merely seeking to redress
a deprived infancy?
That Cleopatra and Antony
(besotted, pining fools looking
to inconstant Moon for solace)
had yet to learn it is Nature
(more sly possibly, less gentle
than asps fed on sweetmeats)
compels fatal fems to first snare
mates to short-shrift duty
then offer themselves as appetiser
mains and desert in matriphagy?
That lovers, after discovering
those worms suckling on blood
at the hearts of roses, found too
that divided, such vampires
double down on eyeless suck?
That mothers/lovers’ breasts—
even stippled by nips which ignite
neurons to curl child and man toes
’round pleasure—shrink from
howls and rancid sweat?
That, while he played child-man
Cupid, the fang of Antony’s asp
was as likely tipped with venom
as an Egyptian apothecary’s
aphrodisiac?
That it was this asp which—
so admired by women, and never
deprived—through over-frequent
nips, caused Cleopatra’s untimely
death to be played out
again and again—
to our prurient delight—
on increasingly bare stages
beneath the floodlights
of our shared memory?
matriphagy = process by which offspring devour their mother
Peter Burges
Ode to a Vanilla Slice
for my sister
Sight of you upon a beloved’s palm
brought spine shivers, then wobbles to my knees.
Such fair, yet unfingered delight. Such balm
this sweetmeat so royally blessed by bees.
Such strange enticement of marzipan crests
in smooth, palely rouged cheeks, that I near swooned!
nor would heart suckle on small chocolate breasts
risk that your virtue be otherwise doomed.
Ah, but my too weak flesh ignored brown frowns
moaned a dark-deep, and then high-fiving keen
as teeth bit and tongue slurped avidly ’round
licking all your crispy-flaked biscuit clean.
Even now, forgetting sweets’ curdling claws
my tum, on remembering, burbles: ‘more’!
Peter Burges
Back to Top
_______________________________
The Burns
When the flame-licking light illuminated the deep spirits of the blackened trees faces,
Roos headed to the wild searing fringes, and leapt into the already razed spaces.
Then, the clogging smoke the challengers laboured against over the valleys and hills,
There the all-pervasive fire-marked spaces heated to inferno ills.
Back when wombats, like koalas, lost strength, orphans of Oz fauna were lacking a habitat that is fit.
Now there’s regrowth of bushlands – they are not forgetting, but forgiving, it was ever lit.
With connections to country, the post-colonialists can also follow the mobs,
Combine forces to save our precious Earth, then let nature fulfil its job?
With treetop-high boxes, 21st century birds breed and rest,
Refreshed tribal ways, we Aussies conserve, and feeling the heat in our breasts.
Every Black Summer observer can from this continent’s ancestors learn,
With a curbed turbulence – using controlled undergrowth burns.
Leaving some of nature’s floor fuel when using the old way,
Wild and wilful, like the burning, priceless native animals strive on today.
Gillian Clark
_______________________________
Soft as Clouds
after “Sky Piece, falling” by Teelah George
Overcoming months, the material change
in exposure strips the stitched colours
to sky, cerulean, cobalt.
Sieves through fingers sewn to thread
echoed in the scramble to suburban homes—
Perth/Melbourne.
Creeps against bronze framed windows
cold, unwelcome. It’s as if summer
can only exist in brackets, stripped back
to streets and back yards, the long
and angular, rumpled—today,
tomorrow—in the cacophony
that is city with its
trampled echoes until—
silence.
An abuse on the ears, flashed light scenes
that hold their own reflections
and the floor is hard. Hard. Falling
to soft, the texture of cloth
the contour of clouds.
Gary Colombo De Piazzi
Dust in the Eye
He settles the ache in his back
against the trunk of a tree, presses
out the complaints against bark
and finds strength to stand.
Seeps sweat into earth
to mingle micro and macro
to build soil, clump sustenance
feed a seed.
He screams at pink grey galahs
and white cockatoos as they mimic
clouds screeching out the sky.
Sleeps with his body against
the terrain, folded into valleys
to claim his due from the furrows
on his hand, callouses that grow
with the birth of another year.
Dreams of a wet to pelt dust to mud
and lurch lazy rivers to swells
in the glass by his bed.
A blast of wind beats against
red dirt, sighs as a few drops spit
from a grim sky, fat as tears.
Gary Colombo De Piazzi
Back to Top
_______________________________
I Complain
A Rondeau
I complain about holidays
missed, and try to find other ways
to avoid the pandemic’s woes.
I moan and moan and heaven knows
I struggle to fill endless days.
I cannot see beyond the haze
or find a way out of the maze.
I moan and moan and still it grows.
I complain
She alone in Africa stays
holding an urn, tearfully prays,
a victim of cruel Covid blows.
Her husband now, where? No-one knows.
Burnt to a frazzle in the blaze!
I complain?
shame on me, shame!
Derek Fenton
Back to Top
_____________________________
Road to Uluru
Stuart Highway spears the centre of the outback,
sunlight bleaching scrub and stunted bush,
a naked heat-haze sizzles on the tarmac,
refracting a mirage, a dancing bluff.
The dust cloud in our wake is spitting gravel,
from treads beneath a tourist’s speedy bus,
wedge tails spiral heights in dizzy thermals,
lizards race the roar to beat the crush.
The driver’s eyes squint distance from the high-cab,
tormenting track of repetitious scrub,
a road train gets a wriggle-on and fishtails,
kicks a clatter on the windshield with his crud.
The ink of night blots fire from the sunset,
head-lamps sketching several shades of grey,
the Brahmin bulls play chicken on the roadside
and the driver bites his cheek to stay awake.
Tennant Creek chills desert air at midnight,
the darkness pierced with stars and crescent moon,
a Milky Way ablaze in far horizons,
uncluttered by pollution’s gaudy bloom.
Salmon pink swims daybreak into Alice,
red centre with a river bed run dry,
ochres peer her dust bowl from the ranges,
the pavement dotting Dreamtime’s broken men.
Division is a racial slur of madness,
like dingoes stealing angels from the land,
Uluru’s inviolate redemption,
an icon crouched and bleeding in the sand.
Convenience pimps a culture on her doorstep,
pilgrims without vision find her lap,
a bucket list to tick off in a life-time,
eons clicked in sunsets with a snap.
‘Never-Never’ highway sprawls before us,
breaking colours from the fragile desert sand,
mournful elders echo through her ochres,
sold out by greedy men with stolen lands.
Ann Gilchrist
Grandfather’s Garden
I remember the Hawthorn fragrance in grandfather’s garden,
two visiting granddaughters losing themselves in his demesne,
his front of house colourfully petalled,
beds spilling ornamentals and scent,
a pinstriped lawn sporting razor sharp edges,
brown nuts peeping “Hola!” from the Spanish Chestnut Tree
out in the back paddock we ran around like Rhode Island Reds,
scratching childish misdemeanours into long summer days,
a big breasted grandmother clucking over us,
we rummaged his straw littered barn for warm eggs.
the sunlight pierced patterns through loose wooden knots,
splintered slats and heavy double doors,
dust motes dancing through slivered rays,
hens pecking as we clutched our haul.
grandmother wrapped the eggs in brown onion skins,
tied together with string into neat newspaper packages,
they bobbed soggily in the boiling water,
grandma casting spells over her cauldron.
cooled and freed from their soggy parcels,
their shells wore a scene of spellbound woodlands,
fairy gardens strewn with autumn images,
I might have seen chickens scratching in the russet leaf litter,
the crazed scene peeled from a translucent membrane.
We bit into the warm centre of afternoon sunshine,
cooked under the cap of a white bonnet crown.
Ann Gilchrist
Back to Top
________________________________
in the end
in the end, when he went it was
so quick. in the end he was seated
in kitchen chair, as if
writing a letter, as if listening
to the wireless, as if thinking.
in the end he was in
sandals and white singlet with
slicked back white hair, mouth slightly
ajar as if beginning to speak.
in the end it was the shell
of him, the carapace,
the very empty box of him.
in the end he wasn’t there,
me ready to tell him I was
Kevin Gillam
out here
out here, a different
quality of silence, as if
sifted, as if wrung of
possibility, as
if notes, the missing fourth and sev-
enth from a pentaton-
ic scale. out here no dis-
sonance, out here where the fur of
thought won’t crackle static,
out here just a petha-
dined blue. here you let, here you pause
and permit then pour, here
you lick behind shadows, find flight,
propose theories for déjà-vu
Kevin Gillam
Back to Top
______________________________
Shifting Tides
Yesterday
the sun and moon
shifted tides
shaped the shoreline
momentarily
Yesterday
I was sure that
my balance
was as predictable
as the sun and the moon
Today
the world turned
but did not take me with it
Candy Gordon
_____________________
Fairy Tales
There’s some that stick
to your thinking
like chewing gum
to your shoe
able to bring us back
as a magic spell
to childhood’s open doorways
that let everyone in:
like Jack and the Beanstalk
that watched us disappear
into the clouds of adventure
and come back with much more
that valour and freedom
carried us as heroic deeds from
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
to Rapunzel to Cinderella
and Sleeping Beauty
all in their own way breaking
the leashes of everyday
and letting us ride that star
we dream on and on and on.
Mike Greenacre
____________________________________
Fruit
I felt as Eve might have felt,
cast from the Garden of Eden,
handful of half-bit apple
Was it worth it, Eve?
(You know it wasn’t)
To have one, you must have two
and two into one won’t go
we know this
and still, we go with it
We laughed before he was born,
promised ourselves,
’It’ll be you and me against the baby’
Yeah, we laughed
‘You and me against the baby!’
And me,
mouth full of apple
already breaking
the promise
with a whispered
maybe
SJ Griffin
Her heart is a graveyard filled with our bones
If you can wrap yourself in a story,
let the words embrace you
like the soft worn suede
of your favourite coat,
you can believe a lie
If you can take your memories out
to sea, push them overboard,
hold them under
‘til they drown,
you can live a lie
And if you can ignore the
dregs of your childhood
wafting below the surface
like a rancid corpse
On Mother’s Day,
you’ll send flowers
SJ Griffin
Back to Top
___________________________________
Hallowe’en
Who is this comes walking through my dreams
Invading sleep on this mournful night
What apparition is it which looks so familiar
And look there, others trawl behind
Similar in form, different in appearance
Do they come for me or do they merely pass
I start up, I’m not asleep, though also unawake
For this night is a festival when spirits
Go a-wandering, traversing the times
Between then and now, the season is shifting
It is the eve when souls of the dead
Move across the realm, betwixt and between
In the northern lands, the time is ominous
Descent into Winter, end of the harvest
Seasons turn over, dark and light in balance
Jesters caper in mocking danse macabre
On this one night and one day, all are hallowed
All the saints, all the martyrs, all of us
Yet not here, not in this great southern land
Not in this vast, mysterious, lonely territory
Deep in this country are other dreamings
Founded in the time when the worlds began
Flaming out from the void at the word of God
And when the legends were birthed, stars fell
Making witness all is in all, and all is holy
Spirits also walk this country, also hallowed
Here they trail the sacred close
Trekking across the desert sands
Treading quietly through the great forests
Skimming the coast on flimsy craft
They follow the songlines curling, winding
And wending, north to south, west to east
Sun and moon cross all the world
In this corner the days are lengthening
Each morn, thanking God, I wake into promise
The dreams of the night vague reminiscence
But on this special night, this once a year night
Who was that came walking in, and the others
All hallowed souls touching my mortality
Ruari Jack Hughes
The Silence of the Poets
After the war…
no, after the camps —
Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen,
all the abominable others —
the poets stopped writing.
They had no language, no metaphor,
not even a scream;
the problem lay in the words —
how could a word say anything
in the face of the unspeakable?
The word may have been
in the beginning,
the word may have been God,
but where was it in the end,
in all those unutterable endings?
The poets hold the stories,
so others will not forget,
so others can add their lives to ours —
but when the poets fell silent,
the lives became nothing.
Ruari Jack Hughes
Back to Top
__________________________________
Old Friend
We might have predicted this end for you
if we had believed in inevitable ruin
from everyday options that poison the sacred,
and recreate traumas wherever one looks.
But we didn’t, and now your patterns
are brighter for all my grief woven in.
You keep to a dignified paring-back
that haunts and inspires; you don’t repine
as the threads of you lift and drift.
Sometimes it seems like you’re giving a nod
to some chancer you’ve come to respect:
a faintly amusing coda, of sorts,
to round off these levelling days.
The helpless quiet awaits us. Our time
has been one long avoidance of that.
The silence will go on filling the gaps,
long after the fabric of you has faded
from all but the minds of the lost.
Glen Hunting
To a Young Admirer
You should know that I treat
correspondence like pruning
a rosebush: sometimes you’ll
think I’m dead, at others
I’ll bloom at you rudely.
But to answer your question
(in a roundabout way)
I’ve acquired enough sense
not to bother about whatever
I wanted to be, back then,
or what others mistake
for my qualities and desires.
After one flees or refuses
the domestic melange
(still hard for a woman)
the prime of life is devoured
by intrigue and ambition—
petty reflexes that are just like
a slap in the face.
Then there’s the fawning
so many go in for—
inadequacy posing as charm
and disguising resentment.
Their glibness is party
to a worldwide malaise,
and only directness about it
lends comfort and poise.
So why do I have to be nice?
Have you asked yourself
what the word even means,
or what it might lead us to?
Isn’t truth a more worthy ideal
if one can discover a credible
counterfeit of it?
If I were asked, I’d say that ‘nice’
just doesn’t suit me anymore
(if, indeed, it ever did).
My view is strategic, now that
I understand my inclinations:
I am not unduly malicious,
nor am I excessively damaged,
nor am I perversely virtuous,
nor am I on a crusade to
crush concern and gratitude.
What follows is just a refusal
to pander to sentiment.
I know that these robes
I’ve gradually tried, then
claimed as my natural garb
aren’t nearly as comfortable
for others as they are for me.
If they can’t agree, the people
who matter will lump it.
The rest, I’ve no time for.
I know what I’ve done,
and what I’ll keep doing.
As my candle burns low,
it’s my right to be rigid
or wrong, or even
insufferable.
Glen Hunting
Back to Top
__________________________________
Trigger
Windows is shutting down
and grammar are on its last leg.
― Clive James
Yesterday. The weather forecast.
A low-pressure system
is trigger widespread showers.
O my English language! You are losing your
inflections. Your peaks and passes, your fells
and dales, your long suffixed and prefixed
conjugations, your ings and ations —
these are my native land,
my forest, its sighing trees,
my home valley, its musical birds,
my village — and you
are being changed. Your strata fracked,
the tops of your ancient hills knocked off
by the careless blades, the need for speed,
of unredacted profit-crazed globalisation —
your streams choked with the turgid sludge
of marketing shite and business jargon …
Okay, my nose wears glasses now,
and I walk the streets with care,
aware of my feet and the endless weight
of the chafing chains of metaphor —
but I never thought that I would ever be
an old woman keening for loss of country.
Yet here I am,
trying to sing in tune
while tune remains,
trying to speak in time
while
Jackson
Back to Top
_______________________________
At Jackadder Lake
as you pull up and park, you’ll see
one hundred corellas, white hand towels hung
on bowing limbs of a dozen trees
in places on your walk around the lake
shed lint of their feathers
snagged within reeds
flare ups of midges from the midst
of muddy sedges might get you fair in the face
coots and moorhens
will go on nodding and nodding
at whatever’s tasty
down at water’s edge
whenever a swan takes off to fly
from a runway of water
your ears must bear the smack of wings
random dogs will want to insist
you sign up for lawn pursuits
to make of you their special friend
this is the place for anything fun
why not a takeaway coffee
from across the road?
or do the crosswords
under free loving sun?
do press enter, but let day enter first
Ross Jackson
Jarrahdale story
there are sausage rolls, squares of pizza
and other roadside cuisine
drying in the baine marie
though the cook never wears black
dining in is your funeral
it’s the place where large blokes
from the Transport Union
go to regularly fill up
but unlike the scrounging sparrows
Our Man’s not there to eat
to satisfy more robust feeders
there’s a girl with broad hips
who visits the tables
(whatever’s in her lacy bra
is balanced on a tray)
to stand looking in
by the doorway
his back to diesel pumps
is filling enough for Our Man
who’s not there to eat
Ross Jackson
Back to Top
___________________________________
How now the dodo
How friendly is the dodo
with a smile upon his beak,
he appears fat, flightless and unwieldy,
with nothing to protect him
from his unrecognised enemy.
How unassuming is the dodo
with all whom he may meet,
his hooked beak
has never torn at meat,
his claws grasp only fruit.
How placid is the dodo,
his brain must be small,
sufficient for that
he has to do, that’s all.
He won’t realise he’s the victim
of Holocene holocaust rage,
before he’s killed or caged.
How wondrous is the dodo
we won’t see his kind anymore,
he appears most endearing,
waddling carefree to welcome us,
to his journey’s end he jaunts.
How now fabled bird
where now from here?
Peter Knight
Back to Top
________________________________
Every Little Girl’s Delight
A fantasy of pink and white
ballerinas dancing wild
whirling into nightmare.
A mural caught in dainty motion
walls pressing, closing in
a fantasy of pink and white
Tomboy trapped in candied nest,
every little girl’s delight
whirling into nightmare
Searching frantic for escape
closing eyes to shut out sight
a fantasy of pink and white
Bookcase filled provides new hope
adventure piercing pink cocoon
whirling into nightmare
Pages open, words enchanting
saving her forever from
whirling into nightmare
a fantasy of pink and white.
Veronica Lake
Back to Top
____________________________________
This day weighs heavy
this day weighs heavy
a stone yoke around my neck
winter just begun
Richard Lawson
Back to Top
____________________________________
Low Ebb
The hour is cool and bright
a truly beautiful day
I sit alone at the farm
an open notebook on my lap
There is no word in my heart
that must be uttered,
I hear no voice of content
or discontent, is there
nothing to move me?
A boat becalmed
on a waveless sea
I ride up and down
on hidden swells, an ocean
too deep to fathom.
Geoffrey Lilburne
Back to Top
_________________________________
Intention
my friend fingers
fluttering moths
flighty at a light
our coffee in mugs
chattering china
shelved silent
a stuttering pen
scribble of letters
the note she wrote
words hovered
on her pen
before landing
Mardi May
Back to Top
__________________________________
we are haunted by property prices
she watches over us
although nobody knows
to whom she belongs:
the photograph came
with this home
as we fade
away each day, she becomes
more certain
eventually
in the last throes a human
undergoes before they become
a ghost, she visits us, sharing
her rules & notes on how
this otherland envelops
when
we succumb, we find her frame
empty, so we fill it with our own
stern expressions
in this market,
rentals make a killing as our sheets
float & moan: even graves aren’t
affordable
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Back to Top
__________________________________________
Mourning Light
New light drizzles hillsides in palest lemon.
Cobwebs clinging to letter box and gate
are small mandalas of Flemish lace,
windfall apples aglow in long grass, baubles
fallen from the Christmas tree we shared each year.
The wrinkled fruit brings to mind your dear face.
Every line an adventure lived, you’d wink.
A garden path cracked and rough is now the road to Oz,
your cottage, splintery weatherboards spray painted
by Eastern radiance, a sultan’s palace,
each window a sheet of beaten gold, tin roof aflame.
Downslope even the outhouse poking up
like a rickety rocket is splashed with amber,
and early cows drinking from streamlets are toys
rubbed to dull lustre by too much love.
I watch from my verandah across the valley,
recall you smiling, miming come on, coffee’s hot.
Suddenly the brightness is too intense.
I turn my face away.
Jan Napier
Shucked Oysters Die
2 am in a rain locked room, I am so lost
in this skin thing, arms pimpling, heart booming
tsunamis, all redness hidden within.
Shivering begins — some engine tripped I didn’t start.
Beyond the second hand’s spasms, numb, a golem,
I go on and on swapping CO2 for oxygen.
Palms pressed flat to glass, staring blue sheen of streets,
wilding eyes blurred as the night’s swim of ink,
earthquakes for knees, I will and will that Jalapeno
boy to quickstep stairs, grin his fictions of ever after,
say OK. Rain smacks panes, champagne unbubbles,
shucked oysters die, the phone keeps on not ringing.
Jan Napier
Back to Top
_____________________
Backyard
a spring shower of birds
through our quince tree
a sun shower really
hard not to be jealous
the shower returning
with the same playing
birds
joyous for no reason
like children
Julian O’Dea
Back to Top
___________________________________
Honeyjoys
On Wright Street the bees swarm like pebbles in the sky.
They bounce about the bonnet and ping into the bottlebrush
whose bracts swing brash and gaudy, inviting sips.
In ever widening whorls they spin. The queen is unannounced
no throne yet offered. Will make a move, remove her rival
and lead her tribe into the undulations of suburbia.
Somewhere in this universe of vacant blocks, hijab frocked women,
old men with 1950’s shopping carts pulled along by arthritic hands
there will be an Eden, perhaps a labial frangipani hinting pink
or roses from Damascus spicy, sweet. Better yet the musk rose.
Somewhere bordering a concrete path a bride once planted a palette,
fine white petals, palms open to the sun, stamens scenting her nights
of joy and passion. Here the queen will settle under an eve,
will listen as her brood still their frenzied wingbeats,
repose in nocturnal cells, vestals for the cause.
It is hoped she choses well,
hives can be knocked out and families dispersed.
Enduring sweetness is rare luxury.
Virginia O’Keeffe
Back to Top
_______________________________________
Letter From Willie
Dear Reader
I am pleased that you like or at least
appear to my untrained eyes to like,
poetry. And birds who dance and sing.
I live with an ageing man who peppers
his conversations and poems
with references to repetitive body failures
and even the approach of death –
just turn the lights out please,
I’m going over. Yes, he clearly enjoys
making light of deathly matters,
and is not averse to deploying cliché.
Bye for now, thanks for listening. Yours, Willie
You will enjoy this little fella, a tiny bird.
He is a bit skinny and scruffy –
like me but take out the skinny –
and is quite tame. He flits in to
wherever I am in the garden
and we talk awhile. I suspect
we are in love!
A hu-man/avian affair,
with heaps of feathers & a bit of flighty.
He is tiny, black and white, noisy, jumpy –
sings melodiously and twitters non-stop. He flits
over a birdbath surface, flickers and splashes across and out.
Re-enters, but deeper. It’s called a bath. Then out fast,
flying up to fig tree perch and drying off
by flutterwing. That’s how Willie Wagtails do stuff.
I spied him once on Instagram.
Like the poet, but without the old.
Allan Padgett
Back to Top
______________________________________
Kimberley Thumbnail Sketches
1. Geology
The amount of Earth out there
pulls on me, sends my phrases
chasing echoes of some hollow conceit.
All of it out there – the dirt, the loose stones,
the rock piled on rock – doesn’t judge
or hector or engage in any way
with any of it; it doesn’t see, it doesn’t
hear, doesn’t feel; chthonic, in-itself
ad-infinitum, it has not lain for 100s
of millions of years, nor will it lay for 100s
of millions more; that is human conceit.
It is forever now, always and evermore Now.
2. Climate
You can forget how big he is
when he sleeps under that bright
dry blue and cold mist stars.
But when he wakes you realise again
how small you are; that shift before all
your senses at the step of your door
is the swell of the Land rising
to his monstrous green and savage self,
a Gaian fever bursting seed, egg and womb.
For the next five months
he will be awake, his metabolism will race
at a steady 42° Celsius, his mountains
will take lightning strikes
and reptiles will rule the night.
3. History
Here nations of the mind
jostled on gestures and agreements
and songs and fights which were all
worked around
forgottenrememberedforgotten etc
because time didn’t exist, only Earth.
Here nations of the mind woke to time
in a surveyor’s glass – a ghost
cleaved to the Law of book and gun –
and strange animals grazing the Earth.
From chain, stock and saddle
they watched time’s bills
threshed like husks off the grain of the Earth.
Time begat wages – wages begat labour –
labour begat time etc – the Earth
was engridded with road, fence and dam.
Loosed, nations in negative slide
across the Earth, losing skin on rigid edges.
4. Society (and me)
The boom boxes are the night’s
racing heartbeat. It is a sleepless animal –
it stinks of rot and smokes and bat.
I try to sleep, under fans, without sheets,
but wakefulness draws me to my lawn.
I hear a nation in negative burn energy
all hot foetid night – the squeals of chasy kids
(who play while my kids dream)
give me the chill of the alien.
Chris Palazzolo
Back to Top
__________________________________
kids no one hears
———- dragging scruffy rabbit by its ears, he tugs
at pants too big to fit his skinny waist
———- pads barefoot on a concrete floor — past
windows too high to ever see through
———- doorless toilets, curtainless showers
bare walls with webs of jagged cracks — hears
———- a stranger’s voice — I’m your caseworker —
he clenches scruffy rabbit to his chest, waits
———- — in eight short years of life, he’d lost
four foster homes, not counting those
———- of grandma and an aunt, he’d lost
a little sister, a brother, somewhere, he’d lost
———- his mother too — all carelessly mislaid
a mystifying maze, his life
———- only scruffy rabbit soothes this young boy’s heart
his words crackle as through a phone line
filled with splintered glass
— when will she come?
Yvonne G Patterson
Back to Top
____________________
deep
All day I have watched her—
a slender brass goddess step
over a field of floating
faces with the demure
grace of a geisha
Meanwhile the lotuses open
their fleshy mouths, drink
the dazzle of this day deep
Jaya Penelope
Back to Top
__________________________
Rise & Fall
I
on the boil
steam rising from a kettle
rushing upward
like tiny voices escaping
from a nestful of tiny mouths
II
the tougher twigs
forming tangents around the brood
cold-hearted comets
unwavering as they dash past Earth
never noticing this is life, and death
III
a noisy handful
of newborns still begging for food
from their mother’s crop
the youngest, pressed flat
on the floor of the nest
Gregory Piko
Back to Top
____________________
Lollipops and Bombs
grandfather was a lollipop man grandmother was of her time
a sad man a vibrant woman
rheumy eyed and depressed elegant and gay
yet with a sorry smile her smile infectious
for kids for anyone
that ambled that ambled
across the busy road across the busy road
just down from the school just down from the school
which used to be which used to be
next to his bakery her life next to the bakery
before the night of the blitz until the night of hell
when hell descended from the sky when she lost him
and destroyed everything descending into black
his tears unable to douse the flames her tears unable to rekindle the flame
their son was a lollipop man
not sad or vibrant
a grey man
not liking kids
no smile
————————————— — a grimace would suffice
for those that ambled
across the busy street
just down from the school
where a childhood lost
both father and mother
to a single bomb
dropped so long ago
on the bakery and the kindergarten
Barry Sanbrook
Back to Top
____________________
1864
fields of gentle green
wave, whisper
to a passing tour bus
five hangings on a
nearby tree
six men sleeping
guns, spears and three
rubble mounds, history
shivers on my neck
memory fossilised in a
granite cairn, gold in the
soft evening light
Norma Schwind
Back to Top
____________________
Another Folio
Visit Shakespeare’s resting place,
in Trinity Church, Stratford – upon – Avon.
A reverential cluster surrounds him, tourists, devotees,
the curious, strain to read His headstone.
Supine under stone he studies the traits, strengths, physiques
and mannerisms of those looking upon him.
He eavesdrops on self- conscious whispered comments,
Palms to jowls, so many languages, so many accents .
At the stroke of the second coming words and ink will coalesce,
exposing the strengths and foibles of our humanness.
We won’t have to wait long,
— another Folio.
Laurie Smith
Back to Top
_________________________
Down River Bend Road
Where does one find love?
Lurking in the corners of brittle hearts,
like traces of moisture
fading from clothes hung to dry a little too long.
I turn,
and the street comes rolling
at me unpaved and hungry
for some company.
I notice trees that
have grown taller this year.
Wayward shrubs that climb snug
under their shadows. Some that bloom.
Some that wither.
I look to the terse blue sky
under which the world thrums,
even in the depths of a flaming summer. Burnt
I look to my heart for love.
The windows of homes
glint and reflect the melting sun,
breaking light into dimmer dimensions.
I stop and breathe.
I am alone
in admiring the silent corridor.
At home in these ageing bones,
with no spirit left to tackle the hike
that love demands.
And, love too, is uncertain,
like the slight, watery mirage
that flickers and floats,
grey over heated roads–it never
promises us anything.
SoulReserve
Back to Top
_______________________
clôture
—————– “ between Summer’s longing
—————– and Winter’s end “
blocked .. ..
she did, what she had to do
he did, what he should not have done
the sadness folds in on him
a crumbling deck of fifty-one memories
Queen of Hearts
.. .. withdrawn
surrounded by remembrance; clinging
that final afterglow .. .. .. lingers
his expectation, beyond reality
hers, vowed not to impinge
tantalising honed dilemma, unfolds
a pungent fragrant scent .. ..
cut grass
its mound nestled beneath mistletoe
the first caress of soft meeting lips
then tasting on a dewed mound
embouchure that drew gentle moan
tongue’s receptors
savouring, exploring
a warmth, penetrating
soaked deep within
climb from city to escarpment
an escape
fierce heat .. .. want .. .. release
dusk’s stone knife-edge keen
cuts across the yonga djoorla
gravel pit of ecstasy .. .. then
impact’s fear
a raging southern ocean
directs to Spring bulbs bloom, blue wren
ultramarine-framed hill-top hut of rapture
ushers words read to bow-string,
ivory and ebony so lovingly fingered
for Balingup Moon’s birth
a War of the Roses, one house divided
white with anguish
red rage, rampant, plunders
remorse the bitter harvest
his guilt, exudes every pore
a promise of time .. .. wilting .. .. now void
discretion’s demise
un passif
defines his downfall
deep memory, intact
burns adieu
——– the young boy says
“ i don’t believe in magic “
and the old man smiles
“ you will .. .. when you see her “
———————————— atticus
Geoff Spencer
liberosis
——————— “ a man’s reach should
———————– exceed his grasp ”
———————- -Robert Browning
she bequeathed him
mel – an – choly
three minims .. .. ..
that phrase expressed
subtle as the space between the notes
a quiet torrent of rememberings
gentle as her touch in the darkness
exquisite
softly fingered
ebony and ivory
precursor to felt hammer’s
padded meanderings across taut strings
brushed with Valadon’s palette
daubed grey
amongst Montmartre’s competing pleasures
énouement throbs
his solace, soothed, sheltered, by une fée verte
love is a two-edged sword
obsessive desire, its peril
and now .. ..
no prelude
no sonata
no quaver
————-
Absinthe tuned his life
.. .. no longer
Geoff Spencer
Back to Top
_________________________________
My Grandmother
I travel back in time
to the botanic garden, search
through confused memory
to find her image there
at the place where she showed me
my first tiger-lily
spots sprinkled on petals
planting early seeds
proud, elegant, gentle, loving
does my grandmother exist only
on the periphery of dreams
in the long, beautiful stems of the lily?
In gardens I think of her
together we look at flowers.
Amanda Spooner
_________________________________
Open garden
plastic plates
plastic chairs
old fanatics
with white plastic hairs
Kaelin Stemmler
Back to Top
__________________________
Pandemic Mind
Wings clipped
Yet not just mine
Only small steps allowed
Must stay in line.
Don’t travel they say,
not safe to fly
they won’t let you back in
Less planes in the sky.
Told not to touch
Warned not to breathe
All this containment
Just feels too much.
Fear. Suspicion. Stupidity.
Surely we’re better than this.
Please go out in the sunshine
& breathe in some bliss.
Melissa Tapper
Back to Top
_____________________________