Category Longer Poetry

kyoto

by Carl Walsh mountains hold names to themselves landscape borrowed transplanted in gardens that twist like lonely water pruned into shape hawk-eyed tombi adjusts air river flows backward caught between forces timbers cut path to near enlightenment feet long to…

Neap

by Les Wicks The tide isn’t waiting now, it never has. Sometimes that house down by the dock had hated certainties… children appeared then left for jobs in a city which made nothing except money. For the aged man resident…

Let the Mountains Soak Into Me

by Jan O’Loughlin a long finger of suburbia pokes into an immensity of grey-green bush all the houses are clichés fibro cottages and red brick boxes facing the road and each other squarely my new house is a different cliché…

The Blue Mountains

by Doné de Beer In the crevice of my boot soles still lies dirt from the Blue Mountains we trekked last winter. I keep finding traces of you, even when I’ve scrubbed the wound raw. I can still taste the…

early morning dip

by Peter Roberts The initial shock is palpable – my feet like cowards wanting to run, yet in a minute, maybe two, they seem to meld with it and wake fully for the first time in a very long time.…

Trackworks at North Melbourne

by Isi Unikowski An announcement that buses have replaced trains for the evening rush hour has become a soundtrack for the city’s growing pains. A guy in hi-viz redirects bewildered passengers decanted in the drizzle onto the pavement’s terra incognita:…

Beneath stage lights

by Rodney Williams ‘I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’ – T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ It’s not my place to invent soliloquy Outside lines in a script, I don’t improvise Beneath stage lights I’m given…

I turn to glimpse through glass

by Rodney Williams 1. I turn to glimpse through glass one passing stream as a tram lurches around the bend across this bridge down at the bottom of High Street from Northcote heading south – if barely seeing the Merri…

Constantinople

by Rohan Buettel The tragedy of great undertakings lies in their coming to an end. Constantine XI Palaiologus fighting at the city walls in fourteen fifty-three, dying while resisting to the last. What remained of fifteen centuries of a Roman…

Red Scarf

by Helen Genoni-Farnham He was a very old man by then, stooped, with a cane and ready smile. Said he’d found it on a railway station in Melbourne somewhere. “I’ll give it to you if you like it.” I took…