Friday night; silence falls charcoal belly pushes forward the mountains, dark as irony the western sky. and then rain clinking from a guttering sky. falling bells, voices of runnelling and, temperature unwieldy (floods in the body, floods from the sky),. middle age waits for a breeze... how to measure the age of a breeze? Air … Continue reading age of a breeze
(The name "Molonglo" is derived from an Aboriginal expression meaning "sound of thunder") plum-skin lake placid marker of our city: an old river dammed, her soul confined to bed into her blank gaze, the sky is folded daily like sheets // keeper of lilac shadows and the bony dents of mountains her torrents are sent … Continue reading Molonglo
In the style of Kay Ryan In the backyard strands of trash plastic, twine or haberdash scratched up from decades now past by chooks. They don’t aim to be iconoclasts; they just scratch and their beady eyes seek bugs or roots or wormy writhe. And as they dig the little chicks check the minutiae of … Continue reading Watching Chooks
the sun slouches slovenly as syrup down Mt Taylor's west side the small girl swings, white sandals, touching the sky, tiny toes flexed a dog scampers tags like tinkling shells, tinny as new stars in a paperback sky Written for NAPWRIMO Day #22 "write a poem using repetition" I was trying to repeat sounds
A Curtal Sonnet The lake’s skin shifts; stolen colour and flicked light, and already, as we park, my camera craves the view. The museum’s bright shapes, provoking modern lines and beyond a gulls’ shirred cry, a wake in foamy white where a wind-surfer-cloud sheers swiftly the lazuli blue and to the north, two cranes necking, … Continue reading Easter Saturday Walk
rain’s applause is welcoming as séance until evening sun draws me in this place where light is the forest strewn between i’m gargantuan as rainbows aching with rebellion stuck in your pose
NAPOWRiMO #9 Image by me The moon has lost her other half in blue. Perhaps some playful wave slipped its leash, and broke over this quaint brooch, this flex of quartz, and on next tide, some far galaxy will be beached by her smile. The prompt tonight (at NaPoWriMo.net) was to write a Nonet. A … Continue reading Tidal Moon
Einstein In the south we’re faking it with an electric spring, bulb bright and crumbed with sawdust. To cheep feels like love and so we huddle over the warm box, giving lonely little Einstein our eyes, fingers, food, and the chickiest noises we can utter. Jerry from ACT Wellness rings to see how we’re coping … Continue reading Growing up cute…
Across the Sky On the couch, drenched in a purple sleeping bag, my daughter mutters “brothers these days!” and I have to agree. He’s a good ‘un, full bottle on the button pressing and unruffled as blue sky. I join in the niggling, first on her side, then on his and we finish all smiling … Continue reading Twiglet #273
Two hundred voices tuned to violins and wooden pipes. Kids wreathed in foliage sing songs of bees and royal peacock blooms crest heads. Crowns of cardboard glint - browns and golds meld among straw-bales and we pause in exquisite thought of tiny creatures noticing the seasons Written for dVerse Quadrille 'Tis the Season
Regard the sliver moon: she cloaks herself in royal purple and smiles to the east, and so we must look that way too, for romance and secret notes and the unhurried chivalry of a rising sun. Listen to the colours of wakening, their flesh, their breath... And pen those words: Love and wilt and the … Continue reading Turn to where the moon is smiling…
‘You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness.’– Ernst Junger, On the Marble Cliffs, John Lehmann, 1947 and so too the garden scrapped of colour the dry soil set to run up every limb and bough and leaf bushes of standing dust sepia shadows replacing bold ink lines … Continue reading Effacing Earth
Image by Miranda Grant from mirandasgrant.com it’s familiar but not quite this unhurried swirl, this white sun-sea vaulted & vermilion pageantry - rings & rings of shimmering lifted bones from Earth's beaten chest, tones of the red red road listing candle-bitten & tapering to ever. old gods with their blistering sight tilt blind, reaching trees … Continue reading kowtow to the sky
Near the music school on Monday evening, the great oaks, arms as thunderous as Thor’s, are still mainly green. Sometimes a leaf drifts down, swooping from side to side to land, light and bright, on the damp grass. A man walks by, bent awkwardly from some medical cause, in a baseball shirt several sizes too … Continue reading A Monday in March
a rope harnessed to a cloud and a passing plane we drew it on a graph the long climb to certainty on the sky’s broad sheet, more clouds: knotted grey mats, white puffy skeins, disintegrated pollen bursts, all cluttered around blank blue space unable to agree on the scene we’re not the only ones arguing … Continue reading rivalry
Artwork by Sally Stokes from 2019 River Paintings I’m caught by its bold eye: that red sway-back dinghy hull hovering on the upside down river-trams, their shingled colours huffing for the shore. I can hear the dip and drip of oars; the tinkered quiet, as Saturday afternoon swoons in the sun whose thistle glint pricks … Continue reading Escape
Artwork by Sir Sidney Nolan we’re all shadows here strung flat and powerless under that searing whip of blue you can see where the land has rusted shrugging sunsets into itself heat upon rabid heat such patriotic decay windmills like stark flowers measure decades in their browning and their screech (skinned metal) bleeds into every … Continue reading After Nolan
Raven Study Painting by Marion Rose the sheets are griddle hot I’m a woman deciduously speaking winter coming in a hot flash it sounds counter-intuitive like the way that crows make me happy I like crow beards maybe they have deeper chins beards like combs “brush brush bruuush” they state ducks question “eh?” long as … Continue reading The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One
On first sight, I see that the surf rolls up light like rice into sushi and that the disingenuous sun has one bright blade dissecting sea from sky. I see that the clouds puff darker grey on the broad cheek nearest to the headland’s blunt fist. I see it all. But when I come again … Continue reading This Waking Guilt
waves fold along dotted lines: perforated foam and the tumbling of happy screams a gruff, granite headland pushes off clouds in uprising and the day winks its bluest eye but at night through forest’s white verticals I glimpse the leaf-lace moon - her yellowed, scrappy shroud I think of her tossed nearly always into blackness … Continue reading two eyes
When we reached the trig station, I took a wrong turn. We headed down a ridge, winding out of the trees and into land that must’ve once been pine forest but was cleared at least a few years ago. It was now full of purple-green blackberry mounds, stringy little saplings, the splayed denuded heads of … Continue reading My Morning
And so the leaves tiptoe like rustled cotton through the window and my ear canal to my sleeping. For aren’t dreams simply echoes of the climate in my head? Exponential wind and beetling clouds and that periwinkle eyeball - weathered as moon-face - my only wisdom. Written for Bjorn's dVerse Quadrille (include the word "eye") … Continue reading Sleeping By an Open Window
(i) a fruit bat orange fox garb with lightly clasped wings. in their black hug the emptiness of a missing teddy (ii) the gaunt man stoops into his groin ties his trackie cord the nothingness inside his winkless eyes somehow menacing (iii) a mural in rich purple gawps against concrete and graffiti’s untamed sprawl abandoned … Continue reading and i see the ibis
into the morning from stacked apartments an explosion of puppies uncomplicated eyes the darkness of peach pips and holding fruits immeasurable Written for Linda G Hill's #SoCS prompt "way to go"
the calendar says summer's done three months of lowering skies // slices of rain poised above hillsides soft dagger grey it fell and fell and now the light the sky’s own eyeballs done with watching slip down against the green fence strips of moon carved, I suppose, as part of night’s geometry all so cleanly … Continue reading “To everything there is a season…”
Evening Drive Driving on hill tops, the landscape is generous – unfiltered mapwork filling up the thirsty eye. This evening the horizon is thickly sponged – dark cloud bruises, gleaming chrome sky, the felt silhouette of mountains and, in the foreground, rolling khaki with wave-crest fences. At a fork, I’m sent on a detour. Here … Continue reading #dVerse Haibun “Cold Mountain”
Spider Austracanthus, bright and tiny globular with rear end spiny. This insect's in her web to truss Armoured spider small but mighty slaying without noise or fuss bright and tiny Austracanthus. Written for Grace's very challenging dVerse poetics prompt - write a Sparrowlet. The rules are here.
fish and knitting needles have this in common: they dive in and out of trembling horizons flicked to silver by the quickening of light the bubbles they breathe (jewels and beads) reach linear shores ornamental chaos captured like footprints on a chain
Blackberrying in the pine forest splattered lime light the confetti of butterflies in blackberry tangle two khaki boots blue eyes sing of velvet fat juice like purple blood or thumb and thorn happy dichotomy dog and human melded in quiet veritas under this salt sky Written for dVerse quadrille with Whimsy Gizmo (use the word … Continue reading #quadrille 146
I stare out the car window at apparently limitless construction. Perhaps we resonate with skeletons, our new suburbs percolating out of them; the pulse and jut of naked road spindles and the bony reckoning of houses. Natural birthing prefers a wholeness – skins folded and pliable like petals, birds' wings, a snail’s antenna or the … Continue reading Build Your House Around My Body
Out of the Cave 