29.0: PASTORAL
Trisha Pender: Dove Cottage
Wm turned in the night again digging his heels into my hasty pudding. (Dove Cottage Maxim 13: You can never have too much oatmeal.) Our first weeks here we made maxims – late into the night. I use 'we' loosely, …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL 2 CommentsOliver Ackland: Back to the Farm
Eight headed hills sway to the mad saddle laughing. Kiss from stray strings, hooked to the hum of the porch. Knees and ears, fresh breath feathers, four legged tears. Owls spitting fire, bathing spinach fence pies. Tell me when it's …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffOliver Ackland: Round Up. Make Nice
Shuffle and stop. Dust to the sun, shakes, lusts for the moon, grinning, takes off. Boy watches closely, mad eyes wide, and sharp and tongue Boots move at a rumble of white, holding hands with proud thumb prince under nowhere …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffNick Powell: Paddocks
Looking out across paddocks I fall silent. Here is the expanse I wanted inside myself. I am looking forward to an unbroken horizon the sun has disappeared behind. Say, I try to fly there, opening and closing a little wingspan …
Nick Powell: Variations in the pupils
Say it is a pink deceit, the dawn sky, a trick of light and atmosphere shaped in the eye. The outlook varies depending on whose eye we look through. Yet for every eye it is true enough, trawling over peculiar …
Sue Stanford: On Reading ‘Learning Human’
This blunt nosed wombat, greedy mega-faun, transforms obstacles to sustenance, chews his way through your front door, your doormat on his back. Rudely, he celebrates daggy mud gloves, or parades in pleated rain, a stray feather stuck to one ear. …
Anne Elvey: lamentation
o murray o murray break (bending) the forgiveness of things what you (air and water) what you (bread) the place you lie down threads of the sheet that covers as if given for our breath drinking (food in us) here …
Anne Elvey: Post-colonial?
All that is white in us in not pure nor (but driven to the breath of) snow that falls when the day turns cold. Our wanting all belonging (in this place), is even more the colon's gesture: already who bore …
Joyce Parkes: Overlander Ode
If May were to call a spade a spade, would Spade hover over tenets and terms, flatten freesias, ferns, friction, fiction, to strike stretches of Pater- son's Curse or Salvation Jane and kangaroo-paw terrains, so burying the bloom labour and …
Cristina Silaghi: practical project
III sweet Persephone knocking on the ceiling love your meads and love your flowers should they be at the door with my sheep and dogs round white boulders chancing upon ivy and impatiens while flakes bind the ankles of your …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffJane Williams: Shift
the same drought part of the australian bush as yesterday only waking to a flash flood water sliding the balding hill and shifting my inner landscape to a kind of environmentally aware comfort zone the top soil gone I am …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffJennifer Compton: Ex-Yugo
All the good songs come from the men leaning on staves – watching sheep graze on a field without fences. So I am told. In this country they dry hay on this sort of wooden rack – and in that …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffSamuel Langer: Lautréamont
Yonder in a grove surrounded with flowers There is an insect nourished by men at their own expense. O austere mathematics! O lamp of silver, my eyes discern you in the air Hear the thoughts of my childhood humans of …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffBenjamin Dodds: satisfaction
Holding the taut barbed-wire with one hand And myself with the other, I gaze at the ground As hundreds of shining grey dust droplets Roll away from the rotting fence post, Down the hill, moving like mercury. The drumming piss …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments OffLinda Godfrey: Sunday Rag
Four thirty coal trains bump and grind/ papers on the lawn at five/ bees on blue early/ empty schooner glasses one drink from the pub/ breeze through the window/ scattering bark across/ kept out by glass/spiky coffee that sticks/ old …
Posted in 29.0: PASTORAL Comments Off
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