Selected poems
Tornados and other disasters
It’s the brightness which stares back at me, and not the poetic ocean.
How it promises to be mine.
How every single time I believe it.
Maybe the light at midday is too general;
the sea in autumn
too still. That even my mood is
indeterminate.
Maybe––and this is how I think it must happen
as you grow older––
it’s like the slow fading of the family
in the photographs of the books.
A kind of transparency that refuses
even its own shadow.
How a scream might be preferable.
I am the woman who watches the leaf pirouetting
over the sand and hears singing.
Who resurrects the trees by making them
her apostles.
It’s hard to imagine what anyone was thinking
after all the trees came down and it went quiet.
It could be I’m the man in Bly’s poem who thinks
Russian wedding blouses will take the place of angels.
Tell me I’m mistaken and I’ll smile politely.
Me, with the black spots on my heart
the Presbyterian minister told me
I had. And said that god had put them there.
One for each lie.
A small child with butterflies on her mind.
Now I find it easier to believe in flowers,
who give continually to bees,
than a god who makes that happen
to a child.
The ferry disappears behind the headland.
And I see it the way you see things when you can’t see them
but you know that they’re there.
Like the amethyst my lover gave me. Which I lost when I lay down
on a bench in a park. Somewhere,
when he was still living. Which I imagine
on someone else’s neck, in some other city or town.
Just not where I am.
It’s how I imagine the world as it exists behind the headland.
But only as my mind can grasp it for a minute.
The way that pangolins exist.
And otters on other continents.
And the molten core of the earth. And many places
I have, and haven’t been.
It’s how I imagine my beloved exists.
(Just not where I am.)
As the Amazons exist.
And the butterfly on the equator, which I think of as a Monarch –
those butterflies that fly across whole oceans,
like we did.
The one that’s flapping its wings,
who’s been blamed for more than it knows.
Tornados,
and other disasters.
Behind the dune is the silence of what a small depression
and a forest of casuarinas can do with the ocean.
The needles make a carpet my beloved never felt with his feet.
The wheels in the sand were difficult to push. In those days
I had impossible biceps
and thighs like titanium. He died,
as we all will, leaving everything behind him.
I find it more and more difficult to remember the specifics.
Where the trees are is the burial ground for many things.
Today, what began with six chicken thighs simmering
into a clear broth, must end with the chickens,
who breathed the same air
we all breathe: a band of oxygen so narrow
you can walk to the edge of it in an hour
and arrive at nothing.
(3rd place in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2024)
[1] The fourth couplet in the third section of this poem references The Waltz, by Robert Bly.
Portrait inside a portrait
one
In which a beetle enters the poem like an anti-hero
and circumnavigates the perimeter of my book.
The yellow towel like a cloud. The actual cloud
(which has covered the sun, so that I look up,
wanting to know for how long),
like a cadenza.
I want to sing like Kaveh Akbah as he’s breathing
life into a self portrait
as a deer. Who startles me into looking
so dearly I can’t help seeing Blake
naked in the flowerbeds.
I’m curious about how easily the legs of the beetle,
which seem engaged in some kind of cleaning ritual,
enter a poem ostensibly about nothing.
Sometimes a desert is a fine garden.
On the beach my towel is candidly itself.
I think my blood can match it pulse for pulse
for colour. For how it warms me.
I love it when I see the shadow flying
fast in front of me
but no bird in sight anywhere.
two
A man and his dog are the morning
doing its best to be kindly.
The earth says yes to everything
the sky offers.
I remain silent.
The light stays constant, but in the distance.
I understand the swallows because they fly freely
but remain small.
When the dog shakes its body there’s a sea in it
that wasn’t there before.
The nasturtiums in the vase have dropped their heads,
but it isn’t like death.
The plastic sheep lies still on the bench.
The swallow, single, is not as beautiful as yesterday
in a pair.
The soup is unfinished. My work
is unfinished.
The phone threatens to ring, but doesn’t.
Oh, Soul.
You are tired now.
You tell me the way in isn’t through the eyes,
though you have feasted
all day with your elbows on those twin sills,
and still your appetite is undiminished.
[1] The second stanza references Kaveh Akbar’s poem Forfeiting my Mystique
(Winner of the Woorilla Poetry Prize, 2023)
Feeding time (or something)
Where two heads vanishing is the disappointment of a girl
taking her first picture of swans.
How what she got was a black and white negative
of two ovals in a pond.
(Which was probably two birds having the same idea at the same time.)
How it takes two decades for the bodies with their heads gone
to become, retrospectively,
more swan.
Jumping for the first time was to break free of something.
Like seeing the swallow, and the shadow of the swallow
with a whole landscape between them.
As if a life could continue like that. The people going about their business
in the gap between the shadow and themselves.
You know how it is.
Once you notice something you see it everywhere
you look.
The shadow of the headland only seems like the quiet version of the headland
because of how two hundred years of history remains conspiratorially
beside you. How two swans with their heads on, is only two swans
with their heads on.
(Highly commended in the Woorilla Poetry Prize, 2023)
_
My initiation into poetry began in 2012 via a creative writing workshop with the Australian poet Mark Tredinnick. This was followed by several other poetry workshops with Mark Tredinnick, Judith Beveridge, Martin Langford, Ron Pretty, and Deb Westbury.
After more than three decades as a visual artist I was not expecting to be overtaken by such an overwhelming hunger to immerse myself into a new creative practice. For a period of nearly three years writing became my most constant practice. It was only after three years of juggling art and writing that I managed to find a happy balance between the two.
In 2024 I published Clarion, my first collection of poetry, with Liquid Amber Press.
Available as Digital book (downloadable PDF) or Softcover book
https://liquidamberpress.com.au/product/clarion/
‘Clarion is an eco-poetic suite of words and images written and created by Australian artist and poet Jenny Pollak. It focuses on two extreme weather events since 2020 that decimated a small forest of casuarinas on the western foreshores of Pittwater, just north of Sydney. The poetry speaks in the voice of a woman as she negotiates her relationship with a landscape in crisis. The powerful spectre of the sea as a beautiful and destructive principle sits quietly behind the poems as the instrument of change.’
‘This magnificent collection of images and poems… is a love song, composed in syllables of sand, salt and sticks. …. Jenny Pollak reminds us that Country is still savage and strong, capable of great compassion. She reminds us that a relationship with Country is still vital and possible.’
Judith Nangala-Crispin
_
How to lose a whole forest
Where you put a word onto the page carefully,
as if it were an insect.
Place its legs with precision so they might articulate
how something would move if it were left
alone for a moment.
For instance,
when you’ve gone into another room to make breakfast, or check
on whether the baby is still breathing.
I arrive and sit.
And make two holes in the sand with my heels
(as the tongue keeps wandering to where the tooth was).
Like placing one’s feet in the stirrups to be wedded
to what it is one desires.
It matters profoundly that I know
beneath where I’m sitting are the bodies
of trees I witnessed
all the years they grew.
My whole life.
Saw the exact moment
they were taken by the sea. Saw them
covered, and uncovered.
Then covered completely.
The way I know now
all of us will remain, one way or another,
beneath where it is we stayed seated.
This is what it means to bear witness.
As putting your heart on a slab is
while it is still beating.
The sea as a mouth. The one that begins by licking
and ends with the whole antelope in the belly.
This is how it’s possible to love
the lion pinkness of the tongue
when you love the antelope /
Think of the antelope
bending its head to drink from the waterhole
Like one tree succumbing / then one by one
the whole forest.
2nd place in the 2023 Plaza Poetry Prize, UK
Flirting in Norwegian
i
So the light when it came was already exhausted
and the sky lay down like a blanket
the ocean was muttering
under its breath.
Two women stopped to ask me if ants had ears.
A native bee was working its wings
hard to remain stationary.
The sea kept coming and coming,
dreaming of the moon as a terrible white casket.
Three dogs, individually,
came to visit
and sat beside me, after which everything
began glittering.
ii
So when the new wing of the Museum
of Contemporary Art
in Sydney was a new thing
my sister saw it before I did
and told me
it looked like an orca
mating a giant corgi.
iii
There was a trill.
The way sometimes
a thing reveals itself but remains hidden.
I was focused on the waves
then on the canopy of the fig
both high and low enough to screen the sun
but not the hills.
Only the rock stayed as it was.
The trill was necessary for the soul
in lieu of certainty.
iv
Because the waves with their pointy hats
were like mountains.
That.
And the cormorant from up close as it flew
past from behind. As if I were the one driving
the warm cockpit.
v
Imagine light from a star
that has subsequently died
travelling all those light years to arrive
(how many millennia that would take)
only to be disappointed by cloud cover.
vi
The sound of two herons
greeting is another hour
that passes.
(The morning like a strange dessert.)
The shadow of the bird moves faster
than the bird.
Cicadas have gone to earth and won’t return
until the sun stops its love affair with Norway.
vii
There’s a poet I know dreaming
in his dark bed. Composing in his sleep
one room at a time
in praise of light.
That’s how it is.
One thing arrives because somewhere else
it has gone.
Morning gleams on the face
of the poet.
The late afternoon is waving her long arms.
The sun polishes the wings of a currawong
which flare like two lamps
at the very same time the casuarinas
which all morning have been shining
go dark.
(Finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2022)
Bow side
What was it I saw
sinking its head in the night
like a slow body
so quietly
I shivered
Which never resurfaced
Not a brim
not one single
finger
or toe
though I stayed with the image
long after I arrived home
and all the time
I was cooking the leg
of the chicken
And later still
watching the pricked skin
of the creek
as it rained
. . .
(Shortlisted, Dermot Healy International Poetry Award, Ireland, 2017)
Vanishing point
because it’s 8 am
already
because the din the cicadas have raised
is a blunt carriage
because the sun hasn’t yet risen
over the hill
(because)
I’m vanishing:
my attention
transfixed by an image —
sound as landscape
in perpetuity
(the elevated pitch of even the smallest
driven insects
staking their claim
their future prospects) —
the way Hokusai’s wave
still hoists him up
towards
infinity
…
(Shortlisted, Henry Kendall Poetry Award, Australia, 2017 )
497 small disappointments
My dear cell follicles,
I apologise for keeping you
in suspense for so long
and for any false promises my body proffered.
For not granting you the long-lived opportunity
to leave home. For the inconvenience
of being
perpetually on hold. Also,
for not having considered how easily
the long trajectory of the past (the undocumented
lineage of lovers) would be lost. Their scent
gone cold,
like old blood.
Today, I apologise for the inconvenience
you had in being on time, every month
without exception; congratulate you
in the face of such stoicism:
497 minor disappointments
released without rancour
into the dark.
If I think of you it’s as imaginary
pearls —
impotent jewels
cradled in the safe
harbour of my fortified canals.
Did you try out names for size?
Slip on gender and disposition like so many
well-fitting jeans. Lie in my warm salts
dreaming of the infinite
bath. David, Sonia, Pedro,
Sally?
When the waves of blood stopped coming,
did you weep? Will we keep company
until the dead end of the road? Eggs?
Are you still speaking to me?
Are any of you still here?
(Sincerely),
Yours
(Winner of the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, USQ, QLD, 2016
Published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2017)
White rabbits
A shaft of sunlight falls diagonally
in front of us
across the corridor.
He points towards it.
Look, he whispers,
transfigured by the sight,
as if he too were full of light. Look!
But all I see is how meagre the light is.
How it cuts through the antiseptic glass
of the nursing home window
like a razor, slicing through curtains,
bleeding
onto the mean
linoleum.
He looks up at me then, his face alight,
the subversive fire still burning in his eyes
after all these years.
And I am full of wonder,
not of the light,
but of him.
The wardens patrol the corridors
looking for fires
to put out.
But the inmates are wily—
they hide their fires in the corners
of their gowns and wedge them down
the sides of their chairs:
the sick and the frail, still capable
of remembering their lives
bigger than the reduction
perpetrated here.
The wardens have been hired for the size
of their hands.
They know how to put out fires—
they’ve been trained with the bare minimum
of their wage. They know how
to strangle rabbits.
But my love is a magician
and pulls his rabbits from thin air.
(3rd Place, ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2013)
The Red Kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway
They stay with me now like fallen gods—
the red kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway.
Look how they stroke the air with their hands
one last time, their feet like two spears rip open
the horizon as if they would carve themselves
a place in the cosmos.
Their staring eyes steal back the distance between us
until I want to stop and kneel at their feet.
Compelled by the appalling grace
that survives them
and make my amends before the birds
take their eyes.
(3rd prize, Rolf Boldrewood Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
Like seed that falls
there’s so much innocence left in the woman
of the young girl
who dreams of what she never had
and sees
through the magnification of salt
as though through diamonds
how casually
love is handed out but not to her.
Only later, watching how her body leads
her step by awful
step towards her death
(like seed that falls on impervious stuff
and not on soil),
she feels betrayed.
(published in the Australian Poetry Journal, volume 5, issue 1, July 2015)
Between
Today I can grieve. Slung like an eye
between two centuries.
Years like poultices.
I think of shadows as indulgences
we tried not to get lost in.
Better to follow the slant of a transitory light.
Your smile when it came was so deep
your head fell back when you laughed.
All the shadows were behind you.
(published in the The Hunter Writers Centre Anthology, Grieve, Australia, 2016)
The idea of snow
Imagine a scene – one that begins with a glance
as if a poet was looking out a window at something discreet
of which the main ingredient was the meal
and snow
the most exotic element of a dish
towards which she’s leading us the trace of it
so heavily concealed and mysterious
you have to imagine how a woman might
lean forward
and with a long and deliberately slow hand
cast out her spice as if she was sowing
her mind’s tongue
and if you can’t discover it
imagine sumac and lime crusting the rim of the plate
like inclement weather
and imagine the salt
falling
thick
and
white
which is as close as the poet gets
– January, mid-summer Sydney,
and in her bikini.
(highly commended, O’Bheal 6th Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2019)
The idea of snow (Youtube link)
Tornados and other disasters
It’s the brightness which stares back at me, and not the poetic ocean.
How it promises to be mine.
How every single time I believe it.
Maybe the light at midday is too general;
the sea in autumn
too still. That even my mood is
indeterminate.
Maybe––and this is how I think it must happen
as you grow older––
it’s like the slow fading of the family
in the photographs of the books.
A kind of transparency that refuses
even its own shadow.
How a scream might be preferable.
I am the woman who watches the leaf pirouetting
over the sand and hears singing.
Who resurrects the trees by making them
her apostles.
It’s hard to imagine what anyone was thinking
after all the trees came down and it went quiet.
It could be I’m the man in Bly’s poem who thinks
Russian wedding blouses will take the place of angels.
Tell me I’m mistaken and I’ll smile politely.
Me, with the black spots on my heart
the Presbyterian minister told me
I had. And said that god had put them there.
One for each lie.
A small child with butterflies on her mind.
Now I find it easier to believe in flowers,
who give continually to bees,
than a god who makes that happen
to a child.
The ferry disappears behind the headland.
And I see it the way you see things when you can’t see them
but you know that they’re there.
Like the amethyst my lover gave me. Which I lost when I lay down
on a bench in a park. Somewhere,
when he was still living. Which I imagine
on someone else’s neck, in some other city or town.
Just not where I am.
It’s how I imagine the world as it exists behind the headland.
But only as my mind can grasp it for a minute.
The way that pangolins exist.
And otters on other continents.
And the molten core of the earth. And many places
I have, and haven’t been.
It’s how I imagine my beloved exists.
(Just not where I am.)
As the Amazons exist.
And the butterfly on the equator, which I think of as a Monarch –
those butterflies that fly across whole oceans,
like we did.
The one that’s flapping its wings,
who’s been blamed for more than it knows.
Tornados,
and other disasters.
Behind the dune is the silence of what a small depression
and a forest of casuarinas can do with the ocean.
The needles make a carpet my beloved never felt with his feet.
The wheels in the sand were difficult to push. In those days
I had impossible biceps
and thighs like titanium. He died,
as we all will, leaving everything behind him.
I find it more and more difficult to remember the specifics.
Where the trees are is the burial ground for many things.
Today, what began with six chicken thighs simmering
into a clear broth, must end with the chickens,
who breathed the same air
we all breathe: a band of oxygen so narrow
you can walk to the edge of it in an hour
and arrive at nothing.
(3rd place in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2024)
[1] The fourth couplet in the third section of this poem references The Waltz, by Robert Bly.
Portrait inside a portrait
one
In which a beetle enters the poem like an anti-hero
and circumnavigates the perimeter of my book.
The yellow towel like a cloud. The actual cloud
(which has covered the sun, so that I look up,
wanting to know for how long),
like a cadenza.
I want to sing like Kaveh Akbah as he’s breathing
life into a self portrait
as a deer. Who startles me into looking
so dearly I can’t help seeing Blake
naked in the flowerbeds.
I’m curious about how easily the legs of the beetle,
which seem engaged in some kind of cleaning ritual,
enter a poem ostensibly about nothing.
Sometimes a desert is a fine garden.
On the beach my towel is candidly itself.
I think my blood can match it pulse for pulse
for colour. For how it warms me.
I love it when I see the shadow flying
fast in front of me
but no bird in sight anywhere.
two
A man and his dog are the morning
doing its best to be kindly.
The earth says yes to everything
the sky offers.
I remain silent.
The light stays constant, but in the distance.
I understand the swallows because they fly freely
but remain small.
When the dog shakes its body there’s a sea in it
that wasn’t there before.
The nasturtiums in the vase have dropped their heads,
but it isn’t like death.
The plastic sheep lies still on the bench.
The swallow, single, is not as beautiful as yesterday
in a pair.
The soup is unfinished. My work
is unfinished.
The phone threatens to ring, but doesn’t.
Oh, Soul.
You are tired now.
You tell me the way in isn’t through the eyes,
though you have feasted
all day with your elbows on those twin sills,
and still your appetite is undiminished.
[1] The second stanza references Kaveh Akbar’s poem Forfeiting my Mystique
(Winner of the Woorilla Poetry Prize, 2023)
Feeding time (or something)
Where two heads vanishing is the disappointment of a girl
taking her first picture of swans.
How what she got was a black and white negative
of two ovals in a pond.
(Which was probably two birds having the same idea at the same time.)
How it takes two decades for the bodies with their heads gone
to become, retrospectively,
more swan.
Jumping for the first time was to break free of something.
Like seeing the swallow, and the shadow of the swallow
with a whole landscape between them.
As if a life could continue like that. The people going about their business
in the gap between the shadow and themselves.
You know how it is.
Once you notice something you see it everywhere
you look.
The shadow of the headland only seems like the quiet version of the headland
because of how two hundred years of history remains conspiratorially
beside you. How two swans with their heads on, is only two swans
with their heads on.
(Highly commended in the Woorilla Poetry Prize, 2023)
_
My initiation into poetry began in 2012 via a creative writing workshop with the Australian poet Mark Tredinnick. This was followed by several other poetry workshops with Mark Tredinnick, Judith Beveridge, Martin Langford, Ron Pretty, and Deb Westbury.
After more than three decades as a visual artist I was not expecting to be overtaken by such an overwhelming hunger to immerse myself into a new creative practice. For a period of nearly three years writing became my most constant practice. It was only after three years of juggling art and writing that I managed to find a happy balance between the two.
In 2024 I published Clarion, my first collection of poetry, with Liquid Amber Press.
Available as Digital book (downloadable PDF) or Softcover book
https://liquidamberpress.com.au/product/clarion/
‘Clarion is an eco-poetic suite of words and images written and created by Australian artist and poet Jenny Pollak. It focuses on two extreme weather events since 2020 that decimated a small forest of casuarinas on the western foreshores of Pittwater, just north of Sydney. The poetry speaks in the voice of a woman as she negotiates her relationship with a landscape in crisis. The powerful spectre of the sea as a beautiful and destructive principle sits quietly behind the poems as the instrument of change.’
‘This magnificent collection of images and poems… is a love song, composed in syllables of sand, salt and sticks. …. Jenny Pollak reminds us that Country is still savage and strong, capable of great compassion. She reminds us that a relationship with Country is still vital and possible.’
Judith Nangala-Crispin
_
How to lose a whole forest
Where you put a word onto the page carefully,
as if it were an insect.
Place its legs with precision so they might articulate
how something would move if it were left
alone for a moment.
For instance,
when you’ve gone into another room to make breakfast, or check
on whether the baby is still breathing.
I arrive and sit.
And make two holes in the sand with my heels
(as the tongue keeps wandering to where the tooth was).
Like placing one’s feet in the stirrups to be wedded
to what it is one desires.
It matters profoundly that I know
beneath where I’m sitting are the bodies
of trees I witnessed
all the years they grew.
My whole life.
Saw the exact moment
they were taken by the sea. Saw them
covered, and uncovered.
Then covered completely.
The way I know now
all of us will remain, one way or another,
beneath where it is we stayed seated.
This is what it means to bear witness.
As putting your heart on a slab is
while it is still beating.
The sea as a mouth. The one that begins by licking
and ends with the whole antelope in the belly.
This is how it’s possible to love
the lion pinkness of the tongue
when you love the antelope /
Think of the antelope
bending its head to drink from the waterhole
Like one tree succumbing / then one by one
the whole forest.
2nd place in the 2023 Plaza Poetry Prize, UK
Flirting in Norwegian
i
So the light when it came was already exhausted
and the sky lay down like a blanket
the ocean was muttering
under its breath.
Two women stopped to ask me if ants had ears.
A native bee was working its wings
hard to remain stationary.
The sea kept coming and coming,
dreaming of the moon as a terrible white casket.
Three dogs, individually,
came to visit
and sat beside me, after which everything
began glittering.
ii
So when the new wing of the Museum
of Contemporary Art
in Sydney was a new thing
my sister saw it before I did
and told me
it looked like an orca
mating a giant corgi.
iii
There was a trill.
The way sometimes
a thing reveals itself but remains hidden.
I was focused on the waves
then on the canopy of the fig
both high and low enough to screen the sun
but not the hills.
Only the rock stayed as it was.
The trill was necessary for the soul
in lieu of certainty.
iv
Because the waves with their pointy hats
were like mountains.
That.
And the cormorant from up close as it flew
past from behind. As if I were the one driving
the warm cockpit.
v
Imagine light from a star
that has subsequently died
travelling all those light years to arrive
(how many millennia that would take)
only to be disappointed by cloud cover.
vi
The sound of two herons
greeting is another hour
that passes.
(The morning like a strange dessert.)
The shadow of the bird moves faster
than the bird.
Cicadas have gone to earth and won’t return
until the sun stops its love affair with Norway.
vii
There’s a poet I know dreaming
in his dark bed. Composing in his sleep
one room at a time
in praise of light.
That’s how it is.
One thing arrives because somewhere else
it has gone.
Morning gleams on the face
of the poet.
The late afternoon is waving her long arms.
The sun polishes the wings of a currawong
which flare like two lamps
at the very same time the casuarinas
which all morning have been shining
go dark.
(Finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2022)
Bow side
What was it I saw
sinking its head in the night
like a slow body
so quietly
I shivered
Which never resurfaced
Not a brim
not one single
finger
or toe
though I stayed with the image
long after I arrived home
and all the time
I was cooking the leg
of the chicken
And later still
watching the pricked skin
of the creek
as it rained
. . .
(Shortlisted, Dermot Healy International Poetry Award, Ireland, 2017)
Vanishing point
because it’s 8 am
already
because the din the cicadas have raised
is a blunt carriage
because the sun hasn’t yet risen
over the hill
(because)
I’m vanishing:
my attention
transfixed by an image —
sound as landscape
in perpetuity
(the elevated pitch of even the smallest
driven insects
staking their claim
their future prospects) —
the way Hokusai’s wave
still hoists him up
towards
infinity
…
(Shortlisted, Henry Kendall Poetry Award, Australia, 2017 )
497 small disappointments
My dear cell follicles,
I apologise for keeping you
in suspense for so long
and for any false promises my body proffered.
For not granting you the long-lived opportunity
to leave home. For the inconvenience
of being
perpetually on hold. Also,
for not having considered how easily
the long trajectory of the past (the undocumented
lineage of lovers) would be lost. Their scent
gone cold,
like old blood.
Today, I apologise for the inconvenience
you had in being on time, every month
without exception; congratulate you
in the face of such stoicism:
497 minor disappointments
released without rancour
into the dark.
If I think of you it’s as imaginary
pearls —
impotent jewels
cradled in the safe
harbour of my fortified canals.
Did you try out names for size?
Slip on gender and disposition like so many
well-fitting jeans. Lie in my warm salts
dreaming of the infinite
bath. David, Sonia, Pedro,
Sally?
When the waves of blood stopped coming,
did you weep? Will we keep company
until the dead end of the road? Eggs?
Are you still speaking to me?
Are any of you still here?
(Sincerely),
Yours
(Winner of the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize, USQ, QLD, 2016
Published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2017)
White rabbits
A shaft of sunlight falls diagonally
in front of us
across the corridor.
He points towards it.
Look, he whispers,
transfigured by the sight,
as if he too were full of light. Look!
But all I see is how meagre the light is.
How it cuts through the antiseptic glass
of the nursing home window
like a razor, slicing through curtains,
bleeding
onto the mean
linoleum.
He looks up at me then, his face alight,
the subversive fire still burning in his eyes
after all these years.
And I am full of wonder,
not of the light,
but of him.
The wardens patrol the corridors
looking for fires
to put out.
But the inmates are wily—
they hide their fires in the corners
of their gowns and wedge them down
the sides of their chairs:
the sick and the frail, still capable
of remembering their lives
bigger than the reduction
perpetrated here.
The wardens have been hired for the size
of their hands.
They know how to put out fires—
they’ve been trained with the bare minimum
of their wage. They know how
to strangle rabbits.
But my love is a magician
and pulls his rabbits from thin air.
(3rd Place, ACU Poetry Prize, Australia, 2013)
The Red Kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway
They stay with me now like fallen gods—
the red kangaroos of the Landsborough Highway.
Look how they stroke the air with their hands
one last time, their feet like two spears rip open
the horizon as if they would carve themselves
a place in the cosmos.
Their staring eyes steal back the distance between us
until I want to stop and kneel at their feet.
Compelled by the appalling grace
that survives them
and make my amends before the birds
take their eyes.
(3rd prize, Rolf Boldrewood Poetry Prize, Australia, 2017)
Like seed that falls
there’s so much innocence left in the woman
of the young girl
who dreams of what she never had
and sees
through the magnification of salt
as though through diamonds
how casually
love is handed out but not to her.
Only later, watching how her body leads
her step by awful
step towards her death
(like seed that falls on impervious stuff
and not on soil),
she feels betrayed.
(published in the Australian Poetry Journal, volume 5, issue 1, July 2015)
Between
Today I can grieve. Slung like an eye
between two centuries.
Years like poultices.
I think of shadows as indulgences
we tried not to get lost in.
Better to follow the slant of a transitory light.
Your smile when it came was so deep
your head fell back when you laughed.
All the shadows were behind you.
(published in the The Hunter Writers Centre Anthology, Grieve, Australia, 2016)
The idea of snow
Imagine a scene – one that begins with a glance
as if a poet was looking out a window at something discreet
of which the main ingredient was the meal
and snow
the most exotic element of a dish
towards which she’s leading us the trace of it
so heavily concealed and mysterious
you have to imagine how a woman might
lean forward
and with a long and deliberately slow hand
cast out her spice as if she was sowing
her mind’s tongue
and if you can’t discover it
imagine sumac and lime crusting the rim of the plate
like inclement weather
and imagine the salt
falling
thick
and
white
which is as close as the poet gets
– January, mid-summer Sydney,
and in her bikini.
(highly commended, O’Bheal 6th Five Words International Poetry Competition, Ireland, 2019)
The idea of snow (Youtube link)