WA Poets Inc Creatrix 69 Poetry

Carpe diem interrupts this rhythm,
imprinting an urgent message
to love absolutely,
to seize that chance to dance,
to find pleasure in the moment,
however brief.
No thoughts of tomorrow,
breathe just for today.
YOLO.

Time’s swift flight
an hourglass with wings,
the human understanding of time.
The tattooist’s favourite insignia.
Sands slipping symbolizing
that relentless trek of being.
So, open the doors,
take hold of this day
and inhabit the time
before the clock stops.

Kaye Brand

where will we walk?
how many layers of sand?

            there are bones here
            singing
                        wailing
                                    mourning

and whispering
do not disturb

when branches fall
there is ash
a taste of violence

who will we walk?
how many layers of ash?

            there is blood here
            angry
                        seething
                                    drying

and screaming
do not forget

when will we walk?
how many rivers will turn?

            there are creatures here
            writhing
                        gasping
                                    oozing

and reminding
who will we forget?

how will we walk?
when the water runs dry

            there is hunger here
            clawing
                        grasping
                                    clutching

and compelling
history will bite

Mar Bucknell

Final Gift

We love you with all our heart,
though we can no longer touch you,
hug you.

You learned to love us despite
life spawned in abuse.

Loved us every day, in each moment.
Across seconds, minutes, hours and
days.

You were there for us.

Death threw its shroud over all of us
in a moment.

It was our final gift of love to take your pain
Unto us.
Who love you.

A gift of death with no pain,
given in kindness to our fellow traveller.
In this life of mystery.

You gave your gift of love to us, every day.
Echoed in your moment of death.

Returned by us with kindness,
Peaceful
with
Dignity.

Surrendered in
Grief.

Your spirit lives on in our love for you,

Eddy Campbell

Landscapes Within Landscapes

Trying to see the land I see myself.
Where one place starts
and another ends,
it’s impossible to tell.

Islands are also mountains in the sea.
Oceans are many and one simultaneously.
There’s the space moved through and
the one who moves through it

so lets it move through them.
The body’s already porous and pervious,
eating, drinking, breathing,
a place within a place.

What becomes more permeable
is the heart and the mind.
How many ways can the self open itself
into its greater self?

John Paul Caponigro

Life Too Short

Is life too short to garner truth
scatter replies like fireworks
on the edge of knowing?
The knowledge that comes with age
mirrors and concertinas time
to fleeting moments.

The myriad breaths that have mingled
the unfathomable contacts, flesh on
flesh, the forgotten words of endless
conversations that filter through hours
where one is never alone
in the mundane essentials
that fill a life.

It is pebbles on the beach
that shift slightly with each step.
All the leaves shed in autumn
to form a carpet tousled by the wind.
It is everything that never remains constant
as time wends through days, nights, years.

It is the rush of the ride through ups
and downs and hanging on is the only import.
The only crutch that will see you through.
It is snuggled warm on winter days,
braced against obstacles, rain in your face
focused on the next step, the next breath.
The next smile.

Gary Colombo De Piazzi

Washing Up

a tendril of devil’s ivy hangs
in the sink I need to move it every time I wash
there is one dying Rooibos tea bag
bleeding into the drain
and grains of coffee like volcanic sand
the coffee is in everything
water and soap fold silence into time
the cutlery sinks to the bottom
scratched porcelain plates will never
be white again – but they are the teeth of home
doing the work of living
the sacrifice of love as service
hot water mixes the red chilli oil
with the yellow coagulation of cream
the whole mess is sticky and viscous
like asphalt and rubber
but the drain is a darkness that accepts everything

Rhian Healy

Studio Sanctuary

It is a sanctuary,
full of drifting dust motes;
a place to reflect, or to just sit
There’s a honey-coloured desk
with a bentwood chair
and two claw-pocked leather sofas.
Frail spider webs drape the corners.

Tall windows look out
into a green fronded garden.
In the spring time
a glut of wisteria blossom
falls dangling from a wooden pergola.
Soft tinted light spills into space
and quiet thickens the air.

Veronica Lake

Missing Marris

This month the red gums are in bloom
everywhere, except on my property.
Here a creeping death has overtaken
so many of the old trees, skeletal
boughs point grimly to the sky.

I grieve the loss of familiar giants,
miss the masses of tiny white flowers.
Summer continues its march across
our land, we look for relief and
pray for plentiful rainfall again.

We’ve known dry years before
but always the droughts break,
life returns to our hillsides
our valleys, but this year seems
to foreshadow a deeper change.

Still, lest we jump to conclusions
in our human attempt to make sense
of our times, let the trees tell us
when days will be fair and white
blossoms once more adorn our skies.

Geoffrey Richard Lilburne

Nature Walk

When I started school, my mother
walked me to the street corner with
my ginger cat trailing along behind.
After a week, it was just the cat.

The unmade road was long for
five-year-old legs and I dawdled
along the bush track, easily distracted
by ants building a nest, a bee sucking
nectar from a flower, or a soft bed
of moss where fairies might lie.

I always hurried past the ‘witch’s’ house
but one morning she was in her garden
casting spells over her lettuce bed.
I hid, waited ‘til she stopped for lunch
then ate my own and went back home
with ants and beetles in my lunchbox.

My teacher was a crabby woman who
never taught imagination, and rapped
my knuckles with a wooden ruler.
A bell rang at the end of the day, and
I ran from a cloakroom smelling of
leather school bags and ripe bananas,
back to my lonely bushland ramble,
gathering livestock in my lunchbox.

At the street corner, my ginger cat,
waiting to walk me home.

Mardi May

At seventeen

Long shadows streak up the valley,
he’s leaning against the tailgate of his ute.
She’s perched high up next to him,
metal warm beneath her thighs.

Swimming finished, damp towels on the tray
his cattle dog tied to the roll bars.
Scent of fresh cut hay,
Aerogard.

Later they’ll push through the fly strips
of Kielty’s Cafe; order burgers and a coke.
He’ll wave at mates just come in from training
they’ll share a joke.

Out along Creek Road sits a farmhouse,
her Dad is slow pacing the yard.
Her mum, laying placemats on the table.
Faded sky, now turning dark.

Virginia O’Keeffe

Moonlight On Marri

Grazing on the Universe in the middle hours of night,
a deep and wide window accessing a sizable slice

of close to midnight sky. Suddenly a jolt:
a massive Marri tree in full bloom, rearing.

No sounds of bird life yet. Most have gone to
sleeping grounds; the local owl not yet perched

with its plaintive, restless cries. I wonder
as I rest on back, wide awake, what it says.

If it is calling to another, in search of conjunction
or merely company, it is out of luck: no replies.

There is a trembling tumescence in the cooler air,
a welcome relief from days and months of heat

as first the Wheatbelt’s easterlies prowl and growl,
then, if we are lucky, a shift from hot to a relieving sou’-

westerly that lifts the spirits of humans and quendas –
this breeze from ocean induces relaxation and amiability.

Throughout the dark it enables personal sleep buttons to
switch to on – and, if lucky, a brain shuts down for the night.

The thing left on is called dreams, and they writhe with
recollection, fantasy, a lost suitcase and an occasional gun.

The Marri converses with water, oxygen, airborne spores,
arbuscular mycorrhizae – and an infinite universe of stars.

Allan Padgett

firstborn

the children on the school oval are uniformed-coloured
playful lunch-time miracles, shrilling inside the freedom
of their friendships, wire fence fortifying safety.
amid them, my firstborn, saffron, happiness shining
within the nursery rhyme of her yoghurt hearted friends,
in play, all floppy hat with skipping rope smiles
as their spaghetti arms rain loosely.
the boys adjacent, are wiry-legged, chasing anything
that moves or bounces, their landscape an unfettered pitch
of tease and taunt as they crash into each other like circus clowns.
they’re all pack-tangled in a coloured frenzy against the fence
as the ball they chase soars over the barbed wire, landing
inside the rest of the world, is lost.
how simple they make their childhoods.
the girls, grouped and still skipping in tune and beat,
have no use for such careless bruising, are instead, feather
soft, tiny little cygnets sprouting gracefully as their mothers
once did. fighting off giggles, they continue to sing with a rising
anticipation, driven by the faultless rhythm they all
keep under the whirring ropes and a new record just in reach.

but suddenly it all changes, for my firstborn, saffron,
has noticed me leaning against the fence waiting
for our early pickup. arms wave frantically and she splinters
from pleasant farewells that mirror her own gifts.
focussed steadfastly on my outline, she runs awkwardly towards me,
heavy school bag unbalancing her. little candy legs struggle
but she still births a grin so beautiful it swallows the sun
and my heart, engulfs me in hip high, wriggling comfort.

here, i am bound only to share what she gives me freely,
and so i lean down to welcome her, stooping and bowing
perfectly, just as one does to their god, but this is much bigger,
so very much bigger.

Mike Pedrana

Cuzzuppa
Traditional Calabrian Easter Bread or Biscuit

Long weekend
baking tradition shaping it
into a basket with a fresh egg
anchored to its heart
hundreds and thousands sprinkled
to decorate such an Aussie thing to do
the ones I remember were masterpieces
patterns of interlacing swirls and flowers
created from leftover dough.

A gift for my grandchildren
each year I wonder
if these simple offerings
can still compete with brightly packaged
chocolate eggs or easy cash
each year I wonder
if they are accepted just to be kind
(to keep me happy)
more my Easter experience than theirs.

Elena Preiato

Synonyms for Pain

What do you write about?
my cousin asked

Not very happy things
I replied

sometimes about dying

sometimes about loving

often about hurting

Do you ever
            just write a
            poem about your day
                        like ordering too
                        much Indian for dinner
                                    then holding our
                                    bellies laughing
                                                as we wander to the pub
                                                ready for our ears
                                                            to hear sweet tunes?

—————————————–I could
—————————————–I ponder
—————————————–but it’s hard to write
—————————————–joyful words
—————————————–when they are
—————————————–hidden under
—————————————–a mountain of
—————————————–synonyms for
—————————————–pain

Sarita Slater

Knappogue Castle

In Ennis
we go to a concert,
ancestral home
of the MacNamaras.

It’s medieval, it’s bawdy,
mellifluous and whining bagpipes,
it’s spuds, mutton, cabbage
harps, pipes and honeymead.

Audience spills,
floodlit carpark
a rank of buses sucks up tipsy tourists,
‘Which bus is ours?’

Clammy cold air, we get into our car,
disgruntled drawl from a bus,
‘why did they build the castle
so close to the highway?’

Laurie Smith

Luminescence
An Ode to “The Milkmaid”

A lemon-scented gum
stands tall in the front yard.
In the long autumn afternoons,
its shade reaches out over the front porch,

leaves tickling the corrugated roof.
The front door, always open,
welcomes scented air wafting
through the house to the kitchen.

In the corner, a cast-iron stove,
dampers half open, pumps heat.
Its chimney sprouts like a bole,
funnelling plumes through the roof.

An orange carrot top in a pickle jar lid,
a boy’s delight, a mother’s gift,
sits on the sunlit windowsill.
Nourished like the boy, it also grows.

Shards of light flood through the window louvres
leaving slant shadows across her arms
and the glazed clay jug that pours
creamy milk into a mixing bowl.

Sun’s luminous warmth
sheets against the kitchen wall.
Her slender fingers crumble soft butter
through sifted flour, forming a dough.

Rolled out on a floured board,
a scone cutter slices elastic shapes.
Warm, settled and relaxed,
her ingredients bind us together.

So, her mittened hand turns
the oven door handle,
face is warm and flushed,
patient eyes watch the scones rise.

A steaming morsel layered thick with plum jam
scooped from a can with a serrated lid.
Smothered with dollops of scalded cream
and consumed so fully that no words could speak.

In a space, the sweet bakery aroma lingers,
love pumps a radiant heat,
and the scones once again rise.
My face warms with a flush.

Michael Stevens

Balance

Life is like a seesaw
centre bolt unmoved
even
in the push
and pull of indecision
even
as opposing gods debate
even
at the highest stakes

long to be the centre bolt
unmoved
unearthily calm
even
as the load piles on at both ends
even
as the timber bows against the weight
even
when the seesaw
breaks

Jill Taylor Neal

First Memories

Do you remember
in the womb
your mother’s heartbeat?
Muffled at first
then vibrant as a drumbeat.

And the cadence
of her voice, rising
and falling, or rippling
your world with song?

And you remember
don’t you
the way you kicked
the placenta, eager
to test that warm, watery pod?

You remember, next,
your mother’s body
tightening against you,
pulsing you away?

Surely you remember
the crowning—
the clashing cymbals of light
the masked faces
foreheads red and wrinkled.

And the air
so cold
you cried out
when it broke
into you?

Rita Tognini

The Same River, Twice

My childhood creek ran ankle deep and clear,
rushing to a cool, cheerful boat-filled pond.
It travelled on to marsh and disappeared
into a dark mysterious dank beyond.
In winter, on another frozen lake,
I skated near the shore, careful to stay
far from the thin black ice that could still break
a harmless place, until that ice gave way.
Now there’s a drone view, a new way to see.
From above, stream, pond, and lake connected
through swamp and town, running to meet the sea –
though years have passed the flow is unaffected.
No longer the child the creek once knew
it runs in my memory, faded but true.

Maggie Van Putten

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Creatrix 69 Poetry

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