Wooden Church in the Country
by LAURIE KEIM On the road to nowhere you don’t expect symbols or signs of devotion, do you? And you don’t expect to trip upon things in the long grass denoting the death of others. And you don’t expect the…
Longer Poetry
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New Year Sign
by EARL LIVINGS Ballarat State Forest, 2015 Disturbed by footsteps on the dead leaves and fallen twigs, a path no trail bike has fouled, the dragonfly swoops past me, weaves through bracken, alights on a tall, green, articulated bush that…
Fit for a Pen
by EARL LIVINGS Glen Park State Forest, Mid-Autumn, 2024 No drop of blood on that tip thick enough for a nib, no damage to its glossy vanes, the leading edge stiletto-thin, the trailing edge double-curved, top half a turbine blade,…
Hiding in the Bird Hide
by TONY STEVEN WILLIAMS Despite summer’s glare, it’s twilight in here with a faint but not unpleasant woody smell. I sit on the bench, pull up my binoculars, focus across the wetlands at black swans: a family feeding in the…
Mulligans Flat
by TONY STEVEN WILLIAMS On the rammed earth of this dam wall, I rest my backpack, look across the water under gentle summer twilight. Something sad yet glorious about those drowned gum trees. Their silver-grey skeletons stag-horn above the gleam…
Storm on the Hay Plain
by TONY STEVEN WILLIAMS Those high ridges of red gum, hugging the Murrumbidgee near Narrandera, long banished from the rear vision mirror. An occasional stunted tree stands up, untidy as an unplucked feather. Wire fences etch meaningless boundaries across a…
Words of intimacy
by RODNEY WILLIAMS for K & R & I In a paper bag from a pharmacy he gives a bare biography where Gurney as poet-composer finds no peace in notes dug from trenches counting out measures in an asylum. In…
Reunion – tercets on triangulation
by RODNEY WILLIAMS on geometrical pavers in an urban garden she offers her pair of guests Italian torte – keen to host since such time she hastens in sketching her lifelong lines of work mixing psychology with dance as therapy…
Training ride
by RODNEY WILLIAMS hill-based training ride highway one water bottle full tyre pressure right solo run today tête de la course lanterne rouge too red tail light ute out front …
Morning Squander
by LYNDAL TURNER I remember how it was to stand, a child on the cracked concrete stoop of the old shed, arms up like blinkers, glad hands buried in the sky’s blue. Tractors would come and go; trucks with bellies…