Poems
Here you’ll find poems from my first collection Broken Ground (UWAP 2018), my 2021 release What’s Left (Flying Islands Pocket Poet’s Series) and a haibun A River Within Reach from my recently released third collection One River (Puncher & Wattmann 2023). See also When Night is the Mother of Wisdom, which longlisted for the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
Click on the titles below to read the whole poem.
Bandilngan (Windjana Gorge)
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent...
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams.
This morning a lap steel
play of light on limestone.
The gorge is vascular, bleeds ochre-pink through
gunmetal grey,
Gaudi's free-forms, …
(Broken Ground)
Morning Walk to Aldi and Back
After Arun Kolatkar’s “Jequri”
A telegraph pole on the corner,
a hardwood character
it leans a little. Look around—
(Broken Ground)
What Does a Child Know?
A Formica table in the kitchen
is where they eat. Meat and three veg.
The child’s foster-mother—that’s what Child Welfare
call her—serves greens hard-boiled
till there’s no body left.
The child gags,
won’t swallow what she knows will kill her…
(What’s Left)
On the Delta
Go on upstream past the old slipways
half-finished hulls laid up, and the long-
legged cranes that fly overhead.
Keep walking until the swamp is crowded
in about you—the salt-crusted leaves
of mangrove against a limpid sky,
and the unplumbed mud and roots
that breathe below…
(Broken Ground)
Lucky
For Katie, after Andy Kissane’s “Jumping Waves”
Today your laughter broke over me,
swept me back under that clear sky,
that windless Boxing Day morning…
(Broken Ground)
In Black and White
poetry can make an order...where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize Lecture 1995.
A photograph of a boy. A fading
Kodak. On the back in my mother’s
hand—Turramurra Bush, 1965—mother, this mother...
(Broken Ground)
Falling for the River’s Course
A river come down
from the hanging swamps and Antarctic beech.
Down to the foot of the mountains
where it slows a little,
makes a wider channel—a wreckage of rocks—
(What’s Left)
Call Yourself Home
I make no promises, but if you wake to walk
and take your walking slow, that limbed
and branched falling your body knows, and if
you follow your feet until slow is who you are,
then maybe, each thrilling…
(What’s Left)
Kindness
1 I scatter my father’s papers
across the low lime-washed table in my living room.
I’m not certain what I’ll keep and what I’ll throw out.
A fountain pen, his favourite Parker sit there too. His hand
is elegant—he told me he worked till it was effortless.
My forehead is tall, and his was also. As I age…
Up and Down a Dry Lake
1.
Here is a lake without water, a bed too often denied a body.
These skied flats don’t forget the water when it’s gone—fidelity
born down low. Belly of the lake: a play of tesselated light,
grass sunburned to a single malt bends before the unfenced
wind, and grins wide as….
Lizards
The fetor strikes me first,
and then I find them, a pair of shingle-backs
with armoured scales of polished brown.
They lie close together by the sandy track
that takes me along the high-line of a dry lake.
The smaller of the two is dead…
(What’s Left)
Meeting with the Morning Walking
The sky,
this morning’s brilliant blue,
asks, “So, do you love me now?”…
(What’s Left)
A Cracked and Weathered Prayer
Stretched canvas, a backwater
enamel black in the half-light, and blacker still the swans.
Every morning I get out early;
it’s the hour before dawn,
the middle of my life, and I’ve moved back with my
parents. Domestic entrails lie where they
fall…
(Broken Ground)
One Thing That Matters
1
The crunch of white river pebbles under the car are loud and crisp
as a northern tableland’s frost. I manhandle the big Ford, its engine
silent, one turn of its radial tyres at a time, in the darkness, down
the curve of the driveway to the street. I open the door, slide into
a caramel bucket seat, and the welcome scent of vinyl. A Fairmont
is not a Fairlane, but this ‘71 model is the best car my parents have
owned.
The week before…
(Broken Ground)
Divination
A Northwesterly
breaks over the brow of the hill,
and finds the tops of Norfolk pines
in the park. The sound of the wind
and the trees
seems so far away, old songs of infinite variation, celebration…
(Broken Ground)
Hep C
It’s not your style to slaughter songbirds
or clear fell a forest, you settle for increments.
I was blind to your arrival at first…
(What’s Left)
Notations on a Spring Day
A November morning: it’s late spring
in the southern hemisphere. Already I’ve walked
the length of the beach, and bodysurfed
the waves. I’m lying on my bed alone,
while a cello suite plays in the living room, and
a few lines from Translating Anna Swir
On An Island Of The Carribean swim laps
in my head—
And again I am submerged
in the murmuring Polish, in meditation…
(Broken Ground)
Thirteen Ways to Know my Grandfather
1
A dream: Driving an old Holden
down a gravel road. The speedo wanders
as I feel for second gear and slow for a bend and river causeway.
I sense something moving behind me—
a pair of disembodied hands are reaching over the bench seat.
I feel no fear.
They’re farmer’s hands, calloused…
(What’s Left)
Dreams and Intimations
Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing…
Rilke, The Ninth Duino Elegy.
Let it drop behind you, feel the pitch-black
bundle moulded so well to you figure
slip to the ground. Take a step or two,
its darkness dissipates, enters the pre-dawn…
(Broken Ground)
Deadman
To know and not to speak. In that way one forgets.
What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is not pronounced tends to non-existence.
C. Milosz, Reading The Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826).
The day is clear. The tide ebbs,
a wide shallow flow of water full of shadows like a second-hand
wardrobe mirror.
Bony arms reach up, river mangroves workman-like
against a mineral-blue sky.
Around their feet, mud caught in this island thicket’s baleen roots and seedlings;
everything lands as litter…
(Broken Ground)