WA Poets Inc Creatrix 73 Poetry

From the flames, a twisted bicycle,
melted picture frames. A row of sooty
metal buttons from a favourite jacket.
The fractured base of a vase, once
a least favourite wedding present.
A lone chimney standing. Hills hoist
with Friday’s washing untouched.
After the bushfire, came the flood.

Maria Bonar

in her waitress’s uniform

we wave goodbye to the songsmiths
we dare not shake their bloodied red hands
they will send us the news from forever
from fabled high-cultural lands

we’ll tell our friends that we knew her
she played piano in echoing bars
we knew one day she’d be honoured
when she sang her first song from afar

she’s sending back songs every day now
that we are refusing to recognise
they are painted red
speak of lands of the dead
and of us with our unknowing eyes

Mar Bucknell

Where Now, Laughter?

Where now, laughter?

That riotous tulku ^[1]
dancing harlequin
upon Death bones?

Here, among late-
of-night horrors’
rebirthings: dark
red emotions, ’til —

as sunlight’s thin-slipping
under hard-locked doors —

Death’s bedding gaunt
in the depression behind,
embracing and unfleshing
my hope, my despair.

Peter Burges

^[1] in Tibetan Buddhism, a lama who can choose the manner of their rebirth

Hotel Windows

I come ‘home’ after work to be alone.

Finally,
a space in time to connect with my loved ones

Far away.

I stare out of this hotel window at sights unknown,
before now.

Waiting to call those I love,
those I care for,
who love and care for me.

Caught within an ocean of mixed emotions,
colours painting the course of my life,
caught in the spray.

I belong somewhere else, but my duty,
my work in life,
led me

Here.

A sense of achievement that thrills me.
Exists in dissonance with the missing.

I hug my friends, my loved ones,
people just met,
through hotel windows.

Portals into my life,
where Home lives.

Eddy Campbell

The Ridge

I would dare myself to run to the ridge
stare across the floodplain
Collie River snaking down from the hills
change direction bends again
around coffee rock usually
although that’s geology
but if you asked Those who have always been
They might say it’s Dreaming
still I speak without permission
in telling of these Sacred Things

Dreams passed by that night the fox
killed every turkey fattening for Christmas
bodies to my child eyes
like white sheets left scattered
shattered all the way to the river
like kangaroos shot for eating pasture
like First People forced into missions
like crazed colonial exiles always on the run
like unfinished business invasive species and damage done
never see anything different
no matter how many times to the ridge I run

Jennifer Catalano

A year in Boonwurrung Country.

In the Eel season we fled.
Change was masquerading as caution.
A tiredness of the soul as good sense
It is hard to adjust when your first lifetime compact
That with your own body is annulled
and your lungs fill with water.
The simplest of pleasures,
breathing becomes a challenge,
but in Boonwurrung country – south Gippsland
the manna gum was flowering.

In wombat season
anxiety began to ebb.
The winds blew across the isthmus
and we felt where we were,
on a tiny protrusion of land
surrounded by the wild water.
Alone as we all were,
but here the quality was different
the land, the sea was teeming.
The swans came to the abandoned boat ramp in their hundreds.
When the orchids began to flower
neighbours began to venture out.
At first it was so tentative
a conversation across the lane way.
Of course, there was fear and respect
a recognition of the others
but also, a wanting not to let go too quickly
of this non -human world.

Tadpole season again brings that wind
and incessant rain.
Land and sea are all blurred.
All is wet
but in that wet is new life.

Then the grasses themselves blossom
as if to say look- look around.
Do not sink too quickly back into
your human pre-occupations.

Patersonia Occidentalis
a trinity of petals
surrounding that strong steam,
All on tap of long strong stalk of the grass.
Reaching up – reaching into the landscape.

The last bounty before the dry comes from the kangaroo apples,
egg shaped berry’s
yellow in colour
but strangely left on the bush
by us gubba.
Are we still too timid
to immerse ourselves in the land.

The dry is a time for withdrawal
to preserve and to contemplate.
I sit and breath slowly and carefully
trying to transform terror to joy
to adjust to the new state of my body.

It is eel season.
Society is beginning to move again
and demand that we all follow.
I have no choice but to sit
control my breathing
until my lungs finally fill with air.
I will not say -this is a blessing,
there is no new life
in this water.
It is full of dread and the uncertainty
of that broken covenant.

And yet,
it is as real as the flowering manna gum
the orchids in flower
or the swans reclaiming their bay.
It is what it is.
Bare of any sophistication
it forces my absolute attention
on the simplest of acts.

ivan cole

Line Break

It’s so hard to change how you break a line.
Change the pattern of a decade.
Change the pattern of a lifetime.

It is not just a
question of habit but also a question of thought
or even moral sense.

We want our lines to march together in
couplets of love and friendship
in stanza’s that beat out our common humanity.

In subtle measured tones
that hint at transcendence
by fine shifts in cordance.

When your soul is screaming
the flow of words is ragged, halting and then extreme
in its singularity, in its own truth.

It needs to break silence
a shield which protects but renders impotent
the spirit.

It needs words that demand their own patterns
flow into your psyche and then break
into shrapnel.

ivan cole

From Dark

It is shadows that hold the eye—
the dark fringe to frame a rose
fence thorns, hem a Marri flower.

It is black that outlines the delicate.
Show it as exceptional in a world
we have become ordinary to.

It is a unique eye that flips
the world—bends the viewpoint
to come close—detail the minute.

It is someone prepared to look
within to unlock a world
always there—rarely heeded.

It is finding the courage
to look inside and draw the gem
from the trash of everyday distractions.

It is you who fits the shape beyond common.
To grow greater than two-dimensional
into someone greater than middling.

among the thorns
a flower to smell
a rose to bloom

Gary Colombo De Piazzi

Spreading Out

Outside, insects and birds hum a mantra.
Everything screened green
as breath steps
down.

Inside, I throb. Pound to a beat
a thump, thump that finds
an echo in primal drums.
Something held that craves escape.

It is day and my eyes close.
Shift from distraction
slip into the comfort of self.
Breathe to the tap, tap pulsing

beyond skin, as if skin is the membrane
and thoughts are the beat slowing
easing. Slipping into a space
that is nothingness.

Something to stretch into
shape anew. The ‘is-ness’
of being where this instant is
all that is—a step into the next ‘is-ness’.

Like stones across a stream
where the flow is inconsequential
and the focus is on the machinations
of each minute step.

How the slip into self
spreads beyond stretches into
every living thing to permeate
stone and earth—

breathing in

breaking out.

Gary Colombo De Piazzi

___________________________

i can do small talk.

i can do small talk.
if we have to.

but while we talk about the rain
i am praying
you will tell me
who your heart aches for
when the room goes quiet

tell me what change
is holding your throat
tell me how your blessings
sit heavy on your chest
sometimes as you wake
until you cannot breathe

tell me how laughter
is the only thing
that pulls the air back
into your lungs

and then we will laugh
together over silly things
yes, i can do small talk
if i have to.

but i would rather
sit silently with your soul
until the big talk takes a breath.

Melissa Domiati

before rain

behind the wind there will be other sounds –
the glass-like call of a Western Warbler,

descending perfect fourth, rising minor third and then
into the cracks between piano keys, playing the

Prelude from Bach’s G major ‘Cello Suite, as if a dove
murmurs within my left-hand cradle of fingers,

in the sleepout, aged 9, and through the slivers of
louvres the wooden two notes of a mopoke, on Goode Beach,

Albany, near sleep, waves licking the story clean,
and in thin plain chant my father singing out his

bruised childhood – could be Lassus, could be Byrd –
notes entombed in Latin. and before rain, in soft focus,

re-membering a slight yellowing of the light, as if shifting
major to minor keys, a squadron of black cockatoos

screeching their way East, ants frantic on backyard slabs
and my father at the piano, jaw slack, eyes shut,

practicing the hymns for the week. and between dusk and
forget, the nub of things – Venus rising early,

a beacon in the lower North-East, off Middleton Beach
in Albany, a herring run, bodies sewing the ocean’s surface

while under dull fluorescence my father sits, slumped

beside his walker, eyes fierce yet unfocussed,

music rubbed from the manuscript of mind

Kevin Gillam

___________________________

Carrying the dead

I didn’t really like you,
even though you were blood.
I loved you, of course,

as one loves family –
with that bushfire heat
that destroys as well as nurtures.

I was young and didn’t know
there was a difference between love and like.
When you died

you thought I was my dad,
both my dad and I unseen in your fugue.
Now my house is plagued by ants,

and they remind me of you.
They are in everything,
their boofy heads clamped on

bread crumbs, walnuts, coconut, dried apricots.
They won’t touch potato chips though.
I drown them.

I wipe them away with a damp cloth.
They collect their dead
and carry them back to their hill.

And come again,
in single file, protected from the front,
but susceptible to an enfilade of insect spray.

I love ants –
their industriousness,
their ability to move weight from place to place,

their instinct to survive.
I don’t like them in my house,
but I like them more than I liked you.

Rhian Healy

I always said I hated you

You can’t hate your mum, the other mothers scolded.
She never smiles, I explained.
They shook their heads disbelievingly.

They didn’t know about the punishments.
They didn’t feel the belt, the spiky hairbrush,
the pain of kneeling for an hour.
I had to be careful, never to be naughty.

Charged,
sparking and spitting electrical discharge,
your pupils dilated,
when you screamed and raged,
and waged
war, on whomsoever was nearby.

Snarling and thrashing like a severed powerline,
your rages went on and on, unbridled for hours.

I crouched by the fence,
too frightened to pat
the wet nose and paws
that comforted me.

When I wheeled my bike down the street,
I could still hear you screaming.
As twilight smothered my day,
I rode to the end of the world.

It was dark when I wheeled my bike into the yard.
Nobody had noticed me leave,
nobody noticed my return.
The house exhaled quietly on fractured footings.

I retreated into a quiet void.
Like an arctic hare, I changed my coat,
and burrowed into a blank page.

I watched as you spun out of control.
I bore the mania, accusations, silences.
Knowing a supernova collapses into darkness,
I quaked in fear at your giddiness.

You imagined that everyone was against you.
You soothed your animal with pills.
Dad hid in his shed, drinking.
I counted each year. Then I left.

When I returned, you were old.
She doesn’t have a daughter, the nurses said.
She does. I am
the name scratched off her bracelet.
I’ve come to say goodbye.
You can’t say that! scolded the nurses.

I tried to explain,
After the overdose I visited you in that sterile room,
but you turned away–
You must not talk about that, said the nurses.

Then, I made the connection.
As electrons flow from negative to positive,
hate does not exist without love.
Please wake up mum.
But your walls could not withstand the siege.

Then one day,
I dreamed you were healed.
We were in our house, that awful place,
and you were smiling at me

Jennifer Hudson

Blind Date

On my eighteenth birthday I was lost, quite out
of my depth, unsure and unsafe, more than I knew
more than I could have known, though that must be
common, for I can’t be alone, surely not, surely others
have been in that same place, also bewildered like me

I’m taking you out, she said, for your birthday
so get yourself a date, who do you want to bring
she asked as if it was quite matter of fact
as if there was nothing to do but lift the phone
only the need to pick between, well, any number

With an audible sigh, a roll of the eyes, a wry look
she made a call, and there it was, I had a date
a blind date, someone I’d never seen, didn’t know
could have been anyone, could have been wonderful
could have been at least nice, but I had no idea, nothing

There are moments in our histories, times which are
turning points, the hinges which swing us round
to something new, not anticipated, joyful sometimes
sometimes not, sometimes so full of pain we cross
to a parallel universe, avoid the hour, just deny it

For long years since that night I’ve often pretended
told myself it didn’t happen, was only a nightmare
so insistent that I’d come to believe it, the fright of it
but the real nightmares haunt us because they’re real
and I cannot escape the memory, it did happen

I didn’t tell her, I didn’t know how, words were too frail
to carry such obscenity, in any case I didn’t want to recall
my shame, to face the degraded thing he’d made me
so I went away, left the home, my parents, my sister
crawled into a hole of study, work and promiscuity

They come and they go, the men and the boys
and the in-betweens: I don’t discriminate, all the same
blind dates I blindly set up again and again and again
keeping me warm for a night, gone in the morning
with the false love they cart about, sweets for the foolish

And here I am, another eighteen years and more
filling the days with work, the nights as they come
trying to escape a memory meanly staying with me
being older making no difference, still drowning
in the safe area between the flags, nobody noticing

Ruari Jack Hughes

Forgotten projects

the crew will be working
tar splattered machines
crumpling concrete, laying road metal
dropping in awkward posts
metre by metre
directing traffic in hi-vis tabards

even up close, idling your motor
no way of your guessing
what’s being dreamed
beneath each hard hat
and you won’t know which of the two
relaying STOP and GO
plays hardest on weekends

the one peering up
at voluminous sky through
cigarette smoke
a lover of pigeon racing?
a fool or a joker? a student perhaps?

in any case, there’s your
need to drive on
unconcerned that decades ahead
today’s work
will have to be redone
over and over and over and over

Ross Jackson

About the Suburb

this
a local medical operative
does confirm—
hereabouts, in this blessed suburb —
stepped back
glued together
watching, wondering
rubbing chins
renters of lives of simple gladness
whose night lights shine
over deep, dark ponds

Ross Jackson

Arundel Street – Morning

And when I wake,
the fog of reason shifts a little,
thoughts half formed, new and brittle
edge my brain and penetrate.
It is the new day
when light filters round the blind
lids which shield the contours of my mind
and keep reality at bay.

The radio explodes and pounds
while I with sluggish blood and steps,
traverse the hall to still the yelps
of morning frenzy, discordant sound.
The last wisps of dreams desert my head,
as I go to wake the seeming dead.

Veronica Lake

A Hard Day at the Lyceum

Down at the local gym
a special package deal –
mind and body workout,
Philosophy & Greek Physique;

the daily sweat and strain
to sculpture art from sinew,
the Adonis of your dreams.
Then along comes Aristotle,

papers scrolled in hand
and a head full of thought,
pacing out his knowledge
along the Lyceum’s length.

His scholars try to follow
this peripatetic rambling,
to catch like a butterfly,
the nature of a thought set free.

As he walks he sows ideas
like a scattering of seeds,
presses them on fertile ground
with the tread of sandaled feet.

At sunset, when Apollo
returns to Mount Olympus,
Aristotle wanders homeward
trailing his mind behind him.

Mardi May

In our game I crawl towards
the airplane door,
my brother pulls me back.
I am the baby and it is his job
to keep me safe.
At the public pool
I am a mermaid and he is a shark,
a friendly shark he says,
I swim away.
In the back shed I tap the wall
I’m pretending
is a blackboard.
Do the sums,
I say.
When our parents yell I tell him
we are at a concert
and the noise is everybody cheering
as the band comes out to play.
We are the concert
my brother says,
picking up an air guitar.
We write songs for the next time
we’re on stage.

Karen Murphy

Heard in the hospital

‘Hi Jo, it’s Karen.
Yeah. Yup.
Anway, they’re turning off Matt’s machines tonight
Thought you’d want to –
Hugh’s coming in and….’
‘You see, we start out as babies
And we are still us
Still there
All the way till old, like you,
And then
After death,
Who knows?’
‘We had three stabbings
On the weekend,
And one shooting.
An arm.
One in the leg
And one…’

‘Well, I’ve had a good life.
If this is it
I’m okay with that,
But…’

‘We’ve brought Tilly
To see you Dad.
Tilly.
Push the pram closer Mo.’

‘Oat milk flat white?
Large long black?
Have a good day!’

(March 2026 at RPH)

Sally Murphy

Left

Fading waft of cedar from the drawer,
cabinet black chipped treasure house of
pre-war fountain pens, Ludo in a green box,

unwieldy cribbage board and three packs
of Five Hundred cards in blue-white boxes.
Below in wider drawers are clothes;
post war nylons, Winceyette.

Everything could function but there is no ink,
no board-game rules, counters missing.
An ace has disappeared with the Jack.
It is hard to mend synthetics, their
warp and weft resist the needle’s gentle tug
unlike old merino, warm, weaves well.

It is best to leave the drawers alone.
Instead remember hot nights in the sleepout,
kero light spilling shadows into corners,
cards spread like fans on the coverlet.
Mozzies whine beyond the screens
and someone sits, curled like a fist, reading
an aerogram as if the news will change.

Virginia O’Keeffe

I could see the crying eyes of over 40,000 children

The leaves were brightling phases of various greens
but the trees were exploding as fire lit their fatal fuses
and eucalyptus oils on the boil swelled and shattered.

In the searing heat of explosion after explosion
I could see the crying eyes of over 40,000 children
buried and burned in the criminal fires of Gaza.

These burned out souls not old enough to acquire
nor manage guilt or recompense now suffer end-
lessly as they search through scorch for family.

The warmakers and the wartakers hold out their
supplicant palms and pray for more, one adjacent set
of killing fields far from enough to satisfy their hungers.

These 40,000 pairs of crying eyes fill the salted lakes
of criminal warlords who preside over massacre sites
and then pray to God or some thing for an end to war.

Who knows how long or short this end to war will be
when the lust and blood settle into branded dust for
whatever time it takes to start again, and again, and …

These crimes against humanity are measured in the fire
and steel of rockets and bombs and drones, all on
robotic paths to elimination – of the many, by the few.

I could see the crying eyes of over 40,000 children.

Allan Padgett

Owning the Shadow

Are we hardwired to swing between war and peace;
minutes away from heaven minutes away from hell?
On an eternal balancing beam
at the mercy of the big angry people;
the hollow people inflated with hate.

Their halitosis breath spewing forth in their noisy rants
beckoning to our dark sides, where we’ve
crammed all the evil gremlins we hide from ourselves.
The loud virulent voices giving permission to think this way,
validating our guilty thoughts.

Never understood Jung and owning your shadow,
but now I see the global manifestation of it.
Is this the shadow’s final hours before we finally kill the beast?
Bringing it to the surface like a boil
to lance it with the clear light of day.
To reveal its monstrous face to our children,
so that the next generation will out it.

Lest we forget again…

Elena Preiato

The Magician

From the depths of his bag come contraband
his magic wand and two conjurers
Craving applause by an audience manned

By those that follow across the land
shadowing the itinerant wanderers
From the depths of his bag come contraband

Which he opens with a sleight of hand
taught by long-ago magical mentors
Craving applause by an audience manned

While their journey continues through the sand
past villages and towering conifers
From the depths of his bag come contraband
In a pattern of coloured lights this fairyland

Which his imagination will monitor
Craving applause by an audience manned

Keeping to their march as originally planned
Anxious for truth – not to be a perjurer
From the depths of his bag come contraband
Craving applause by an audience manned

Barry Sanbrook

Acorns

acorns sitting high in their cups
peeping between green frilly frocks
asked me to hug their mother
to brush her bark with my palm
and to remember the barren tree
solid and solitary at childhood’s back gate

I spent years watching her infertility
but left before she could see mine
aching through worm holes
dyed and filmed
eggs snatched and incubated
flushed away

I wonder if the blackbird still hangs summer
from the tips of her branches
above her frilly green frocks
I want to tell her I have acorns now
and I hope she has too

Soulo

___________________________

Da Lat, Vietnam, 1997

Only French and Vietnamese Arrival sees us at the Golf Course Hotel
the only Europeans there.
Overnight, bears’ paws disappear
from the menu. Suddenly no-one
speaks English. We move.

The kids clamour to stay at the Crazy House.
Rooms with wild organic forms,
free-flowing walls, grotesque animals
of papier mâché or plaster, painted
outrageously, Gaudi-inspired.

The monk alone in the temple on top
of the hill is a famous artist. His ink paintings
strewn over the bushes drying,
stacked on trestle tables on wide verandas.
He draws bamboo for me, our dog for my son.

are spoken
at the central markets. We want warm clothes.
After much miming, broken
by helpless grins, we find jackets
and parkas amid beaming stall holders.

A sense of fun
is essential in a land
whose people are naturally
inclined to laughter.

Amanda Spooner

“She went too soon”
they say
sipping their teas around the table.
“Poor people left behind”
she says
reaching for another choccy biscuit.

“I always wondered’
she says
flinging back her glass of red
“if her parents really knew. I mean
did they keep an eye out? I mean
they seem like a really fine family
but it can happen to anyone”
they say.

I move around the edges
skirting that big black hole
Can’t see it, can’t feel it;
close my eyes to jump over cracks
half hoping to stumble,
fall through.

“So sorry” they murmur
when they say anything
“Don’t know what to say”
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry

Sorrow.
A word hanging in my head
now a word like any other,
like is or was or love.

Words
Don’t Mean
Anything
Any Thing
Anymore
Everyone
Everything
One Thing
One Person.
One One
ONE

Suzette Thompson

Inconsequential

Early summer dawn. Sky neonate white.
Drifts of eucalyptus leaves and twigs
scattered on the driveway, soil and plants
damp from morning watering.

A bird call. I look up, scan high boughs
for honeyeater, wattlebird, magpie,
discern only clusters of leaves,
glance down, find a plump-perfect
white hen nested at my feet.
Unfazed and friendly, she chortles
at my gaze, red wattle wobbling.

She’s escaped my neighbour’s yard.
I cluck her across road, coax her
to the makeshift mesh, the chook pen.
How easy it must have been to flap
over that flimsy hurdle, to hurdy-gurdy
into open space.

I pick her up, hover over mesh, fingers
surprised by the deep yield of feathers.
I linger, fox-like. Release my grasp.
Deliver her to her mottled-brown hen-friends.

Rita Tognini

Six Words to a Sestina

The start is easy: one.
An old favourite song is Tea for Two.
Remember the magic number: three.
I’m a Beatles fan— love the Fab Four
I can’t think of anything witty for five.
It’s sux in enzed but here we say six.

In a sestina stanza and lines equal six.
To be clever I picked this one.
It’s taking hours and dinner’s at five

but that’s easy just for us two
add the cat and dog for four
Don’t forget the blind mice, three.

This is stanza number three
and I’m almost halfway to six
then the line requires number four.
Is this the loneliest number?  One.
What’s next? One fish…Two!
How many golden rings? Five

The song repeats and so do I: five.
Think of classic rock chords? Three.
What am I going to do about two?
I have the same problem with six.
This stanza almost done except for one.
that has to end with four.

Can I cheat and say what for?
I think of the Famous Five.
I could use their help! I’m only one
doing the work of at least three
which feels more like six.
Nearly finished, about time too.

Noah counted the animals by twos.
Clover is lucky if its leaves number four.
Drinks often come in packs of six.
Now I’m nearly done – high five!
I’ll print some copies, at least three.
Finally the beginning, and the end: one.

My first two attempts turned into five,
frustrated by four but there’s hope for three,
and after six sestinas I might have a good one.

Maggie Van Putten

Jacqueline du Pré

In those last concerts at age twenty-eight
she had lost sensation in her fingers so
she had to stare at the fingerboard to find
the notes. The weight of the bow had become
a mystery to her – she who could soar in an instant
out of the lyrical into the frenetic – who knew
how to shudder an auditorium – answering
a whole orchestra with a god’s authority
gyring and plunging with a falcon’s fierce
efficiency – then floating effortless into the Numen.

It breaks me – hearing her pressed in vinyl – or
in the alien ethers of modern technologies –
preserved forever in the thrill of playing
before the taut strings of her nerves had lost
their sheaths and her bow hand pulsed
with numbness and with pain. I hear her playing
Dvorak again – again – again – as though
she’s in the room beside me – lending such
incandescent breath to the inert hollow of her cello –
and think how at the end she could barely open
the case that held it – living all the rest in Elgar’s minor key.

Giles Watson

Transfigured

What the paintings and the Gospels don’t tell you
is that when he ascended the mountain and started
to glow – that was a halo of pain everyone was seeing
and that Peter, James and John were not the only
witnesses. There were also Martha and Mary and Mary –
who felt the heat and were carrying it with him.

If they touched him – it seemed the glow of torment
came off on their fingers as bioluminescent slime
and seeped inwards – setting their hearts aglow
with pain and light – so that they understood things
that Peter, James and John could never know. The Great Men
went away thinking they had all the Gospel – not yet feeling
the way that white-hot radioactivity throbs and settles
in the bone-marrow – igniting the agony of empathy –
tearing mercilessly at the taut sinews of judgement –
sometimes wild – sometimes latent – awaiting another flare.

Giles Watson

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