Thirteen Swifties

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Simon Patton

i. Australian English

The water
we drink from the tap
is the same
warder
who keeps us all jailed —
in drought.


ii. Balancing Act

The body understands
first hand the gravity
of its position.


iii. Intent …

Do you know
what the last word
of your sentence will be
when you open your mouth
to speak?


iv. Her Clumsiness

Like fingers fallen
into the wrong hands.


v. His Sweatheart

The sweat stain
on the back of his green T-shirt —
an almost perfect
heart.


vi. Another Beautiful Loser

Only the rain
knows how to celebrate
its downfall.


vii. Dangerman

I see the crashes
up and down the scarparks
of his arms.


viii. Negative Growth (After Adam Zagajewski)

In the car park
cigarette butts grow,
not daisies.


ix. Sonic Simile

The drip of a tap:
a blind woman’s stick
on bone-dry footpaths.


x. False Generosity

Like a dead battery,
free of charge.


xi. Beneath Agitation Hill

White faces in a wet tent.

They flinch in the rain
at a painted face,
a red head-band, the glimpse
of a spear. Feel them flinch
in their trenches,
the chill thought
of gold behind them —

living, steadying.


xii. Loyalty

Do sunflowers
turn their heads
from a full moon?


xiii. That Girl’s Clear Eyes

for Tiara

You outstare skies
with those
wideopen
video eyes.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

No Poem for Weeks Now

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Simeon Kronenberg

for David Brooks

Nothing for weeks, no urgent need,
no jolt. Instead, I sit in a café reading,
only occasionally looking up to see
students wearing expensive
headphones, as they text or talk
on their mobiles. I think about my life,
nothing much is ever truly planned,
so much just fallen into. But there’s pleasure
in the sometimes lonely drift, the tender
space between the trees as I remember
the old man sitting under the pawlonias
on his rush seat in the winter sun,
gathering poems and holding a cup
of treasured wine – occasionally looking
through his round gate at the bare trees
and at boys walking the muddied lane
beyond his walls – richer lads chattering
in groups and picking up their robes
to save their silks, poorer ones in workers’
drab cloth, arms tanned by the sun
of the sorghum fields. They laugh and chatter
sharing secrets as they drudge or pick
their way through mud and dung, oblivious
to the old poet, tying a red, deliberate ribbon
around his sheath of poems.

The title, ‘No poem for weeks now’ is borrowed from a poem in David Brooks’s collection Open House.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

The Political Poem

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Chris Armstrong

No-one offers appropriation
of the physical.

I won’t

sit myself in the chair,
lay my hands on its arms
watch the shackles click shut
panic, as the hood is placed
over
my
eyes …

*

They say don’t start with political poetry
that’s like opening up too soon
in the front bar of the Braidwood Pub
collared by assumptions
of what the regular means
when he says there’s no riverbed for that
bottle of red in a brown paper bag.

*

I think I would think of the small birds
who have visited me out of interest
southern emu wren, scrubber, blueys,
yellow robins, the fire tails.

Picture them hopping by my feet
pecking up crumbs of panic.

I listen for the burr of fast wings flying in
to roost in the darkness of fear.

*

My kitchen-sink understanding –
the way he swivels the Stop Go sign at work
and twists his schooner in that quiet corner

we all look up

to the TV and the hooded boy
strapped to a chair in Darwin.

The regular says, that is no way
to fix a broken boy.

He doesn’t say, the riverbed was a flood
of artesian prejudice. I pour
two glasses of red,
its drowning within reach.

*

This is what I torture.

I would rather it be me
than an itty bitty bird
a hood tied by tiny string
around its feathered neck.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Young Animism

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Anders Villani

A white-blonde boy
stands toe-to-wave on a surf beach
in Queensland, midwinter. He
has just dug from the shallows
a small, ruddy shell. Some kind of ark, perhaps

although the plump red-lipped
mouth—that cups his right ear, nibbles it, hisses into it
—and fetid stench almost class
the prize animal—crablike.

With his right pointer, he dings the dull
bell. Silted with sand, warm seawater swells his cheeks
to bulging, because he is a puffer fish.

And throughout the dinging the boy listens to the rollers
quaking through the stinger nets
as if the stinger nets are seagrasses, and the rollers
seeking out the grasses so as
to tell him secrets in hiding.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Fleet of Foot

Posted on May 1, 2017 by James Gering

Quiet at the pool today
lake-like in its repose, no youth
ripping the air asunder
with howls and whoops.
After my swim, in the change-room,
a centurion on twig legs
steps into the showers.

Below his shiny head, his face maps
a thousand trails, a thousand yarns,
eyes and mouth near forfeited
in the jagged topography.

Wisps of hair like sleet
line the ridges of his shoulders.
His cock (retired) snuggles
in a little glade of groin.
The man appears to have on socks
but the night blue colour
is actual skin.

The centurion turns.
Turf wars play out over his back:
wrinkles, liver spots, blotches,
gangs of colonisers all vying
for carrion. Two skimpy carry bags
of skin denote his arse, the pits
of his knees house tangles
of angry veins.

The man shuts off the water,
rubs a towel across his skin,
drapes clothes over his skeleton.

He departs across the grass where,
flanking the compost heap,
some dead vines latch onto
his foot. He kicks them off
with a two-step, turns fleet of foot
and gives me the finger.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Neos Kosmos

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Zoe Holman

You laid the city out for me in constellations
nocturnal (and always on foot)
plotting its key configurations—
Monastiraki, Keramikos, Omonia…
Scorpio had chased Orion
from the sky, its expanses benign
warm pewter to etch on.

Now, as he inches back
for a season of game (a sanctioned
but no less fatal hunt) we chart
new corners, the cold reaches
of Metaxourghio, Neos Kosmos, Sigrou Fix
So my map is indelible with the art
of a mathematician’s hand—
though your body, like your physics
would elude me in it, always slipping
through the blanks in the diagram.

By day, I trace its lines underground
dark, clanging journeys coursing
between elements and compounds.
It is milk, you tell me—gala—a revelation
of white particles, viscose, barely substantial
cohering against the probability of motion.
Elated, you marvel at its sum—an amalgam
of all the preceding, still existing, moments.

But unscientific, I could not reach back to them
discern the echoes of an expiring cosmos
or lapsed seconds from light-years
since your footfall on Solonos.
Gauging the distance between stars
I hold up an index finger, two digits,
a hand-span, and measure the emptiness in units.

And when I buy a pomegranate for my sill
(to lure you) I’m given a pair. They sit
axis tilted, in erratic unstable orbit
a two-body problem. Later they will
hear you lay back, still shuddering
and say the universe has changed
but it is always changing, I say
and so it did—shifting and fragmenting too fast
to grasp, before I’d even registered its range.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Cobber

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Anthony Lawrence

I will summon again the wise, unreliable counsel of what remains
of childhood memory, to make what I can from the times
I saw myself in the eyes of the animals who lowered or turned

their heads to me. I was curious, and while not without fear
I wanted to be close, if not to touch, then to inhale
and understand, my senses tactile and raw. When a goat came to

the end of its rope where I was waiting on my knees on a carpet
of thistledown and the bones of sticks from a dying cottonwood
it looked at me, its breath like bits of wind off a wet paddock.

When it put its face to mine in a gesture I saw as curiosity
and welcome, its eyes contained black slashes, as though identical
cuts were still healing, then it stepped back and chewed sideways

before my forehead was printed and opened by twin mounds
of horn. I was laid out cold on my cousin’s farm by a head-butt
from a goat called Cobber. Years later, my father told me

that Cobber had been led by his rope to be prepared, then served
with beer and salad to cricketers by the Bendemeer River.
I can still see myself in a small way, leaning forward in my need

to be nuzzled and accepted into that eaten-down world.
I can imagine the shape of my mouth before the country light
went out, it was trying to make all kinds of sounds for hello.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Yesterdays

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Rod Usher

They think they can just slip away
given there´s always another coming.
Film with the volume turned down
like tinnitus, a background humming
the office of lost, never found.

They believe they are safely dead
that each sunrise prints a full stop.
A new crowd is knocking to enter
mind´s overwhelmed workshop;
tangents once again defeat centre.

They lie deep within Jung´s dark
but there is a way to trick time past.
Don´t release, say, 5.10 yesterday,
one certain moment, hold it fast,
that feeling no clock can gainsay.

With winter sun littering the floor,
we curled on the couch, as we do.
I was stroking one of your small feet.
5.10 again, alone, more than déjà vu,
time returns, my heart´s still replete.

All our yesterdays have lighted fools …
and a lesson of love is to let it go,
accept dusty death, all that´s gone.
But we fools against the tide row,
hearts holding, holding, holding on.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

The First Four Hours

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Chloe Wilson

‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.’
– unknown; often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln

However blunt the blade was
to begin with, one must admit:
the time allocated to undertake the task

seems excessive. Four hours
with the stovepipe hat set aside, the shirtsleeves
rolled, four hours whistling as he held

the weapon to the whetstone’s happy edge
or brought it to the wheel, then depressed
and depressed his hefty boot,

scraping out sparks in a celebratory
cascade. He must have stopped
every so often to roll his shoulders, to stretch

the presidential neck and quadriceps —
nevertheless, patience is the lesson,
patience while his waistcoat darkens

from perspiration, while he ignores
a sacral ache, patience while state business
remains in stasis, patience while the thing

is whittled sharper than the republican
cheekbones from which his gravitas hung. Surely
there comes a point at which the thing

can be no keener, when the dream
of raw timber becomes sweeter
than any genuine sap could be, varnishing

one’s palms with its dark, deciduous gleam.
There must be a moment in which
preparation extends past itself,

past readiness, into the pleasure inherent
in tension; some unstatesmanlike frisson,
too impolitic to mention.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Seeing Francis

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Gabrielle Higgins

after Francis Bacon’s Self portrait, 1980

I’m embarrassed by your lips
voluptuous almost dewy focal point

oil masquerading as pastel is bleeding
in unfinished fibres you keep your eyes back

near your ear crimson cross hatches
while below your sharp collar jaw
you are undefined and float in blue

a curtain absorbed a permeating mist
we see your weave near to instinct

this is not the colour palette of wounds
but every indelible mark on the unprimed
canvas is as blunt as raw meat

it’s no wonder I can’t hold your gaze
you ask that I stake everything

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Brothers

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Omar Sakr

My cousin the farmer is laden with death
he tells me each morning he checks the chickens
while I sleep. The weaklings need killing,
so he walks amongst them, dawn-spectre,
and takes their lives. It has to be done
he tells me. While I sleep, the long sheds
hot as summer’s guts, are home to lone
acts of kindness. Among ten thousand
fluffed bodies, his eyes hawk upon
the others, the strange-winged, hobbling,
he tells me: I get a little rope, noose
it round their necks and hang them
from the ceiling. He laughs at my belief.
I’m kidding. I just snap their necks,
like this—his huge hands twist the air
so sharp I’m surprised it doesn’t crack.
Ravens haunt the nearby treetops
and foxes stalk the feathered earth
outside the sheds the survivors yet
live, for now. My cousin tells me
Cain and Abel were the first
to farm, to keep and raise animals
as sacrifice. A lamb for God. A brother
for the devil, who taught a man how
a stone could crack a skull, but not
why. When the devil brought news
of her son’s downfall, Eve said, “Woe
to you. What is murder?” “He eats not.
He drinks not. He moves not,” said he
in reply. Many months I have lain
as if felled by a fallen angel
unable to move I tell my cousin
Maybe I lose half my days
in penance, maybe I die a little
every night, for this. The absence
of a brother. He walks away
from belief. He will sleep tonight
in the hot house, lying in the reek
of their living. He will be covered
in a cloak of wings, hear the song
of too-many hearts, and his hands
will be stone-less, still, all of them
waiting for the crack of dawn.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Wharf Toward Winter

Posted on May 1, 2017 by John Stokes

Then the spare melancholy
of a wharf toward winter: the island
opening the long view South
the wuthering of gunfire on wind

Safe in this cold anchorage
you can’t hear all the cries
you can’t hear all the gnashing
you can’t hear, can’t hear again

The Island of No is beautiful
grabbing its own to its own
beautiful at cutting the waters
and repeating the patterns, repeating

the patterns, its blow-hards scraping
the fronds from the crevices under the wharf
toward winter, the waves draining
out to the long view South…

The Island, its stealers-away
taking the light by force,
leaves the waves to die
singing of gunfire on wind.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Five Hundred Mornings

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Julie Manning

Mornings begin with a raven
and magpie lark shadow boxing
in winged profile –
my study of two forms,

framed in a square of light.
These companions – small,
tousled, analogous to coastal life
on roofs and aerials

counterpoint a bathing ritual:
I pray, proffered hands
sluicing water to wakefulness.
A lace skeleton, the morning

backlit with feathers
and burned coral edges.
No need to personify
the magpie lark as lonely refugee –

more an imprint of shadow
that darts and weaves,
shrieking its dissonance.
In this northern light,

birds bewitch with coded talk
over the dark form houses
tuckeroos printed in relief,
and a red-eyed warbler

chiming last notes. Raven,
magpie lark, windblown foam
and sea spray piled up –
soft collisions in every window.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

The Storm

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Jill Jones

The storm catches on the door.
It’s a good sign, a surge that’s more than breathing,
that blows away dirt from reliquaries,
and directions from their careful signs.
It’s near speech and near trembling,
sky bringer fate crowning from its centre,
if there was a centre rather than millennia
of waves, segmentation, volcanic chemistry.
And all this chlorophyll blowing around,
that does not understand solitude
but certainly vortex and rage,
the made and unmade clouds, constant phantoms
and caprices, the moving walls.
There is no void.
There is future,
no matter which way breaks,
the branch we find fallen on the new plants.
It’s not a lucky escape from death, rust, abrasion, or bad thoughts
as I revise the possibilities within milliseconds.
A second doesn’t describe any thought.
A thought doesn’t show how I might want to run.
Time has nothing to do with what I hope to find
trembling in a gauge or written on a screen.
What passes is passing, and will pass.
If anything is eternal it is the motion,
as I step out to sweep what has gone and come.
The leaves make a noise almost as if
I was waiting for someone.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Haar

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Eileen Chong

… I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.
Selected Letters, Emily Dickinson

In the corners mould is blooming
like grey and black snowflakes.
Next to the window, white paint
blisters; water swells its skin.

On winter mornings moisture
ghosts the glass, announcing
the divide between outside
and us. Warm on the inside,

under this roof. A cat curled
up in the blankets. Hot tea
steams in mugs. The garden is wet
and glistening. It rained some time

during the night. When I rose
in the dark I heard the scatter
of drops on leaves. The lift
and fall of your breath. The damp.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Barns in Charlevoix

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Carol Jenkins

I like the barns, their air of constancy,
their un-renovated geometry, their wooden deshabille,
that they have high hipped roofs — and windows

set without regard to symmetry — that they are unpainted,
the wood grey or brown with age, with parts that lean in
or out, that some are abandoned but endure, that one

imagines the light inside — diffuse and murky
or the doors opening wide and a sudden shaft
of afternoon pouring like honey into dark tea

and the scent of hay and sweet apples on a high
shelf – the horse and cow smells fading,
old leather bridles, iron parts of farm machines,

sump oil, the ammonia of mice,
rough hessian sacks of chaff and bags
of chicken feed, that time here re-collects itself —

sleeps like Keat’s Autumn on the bales — and
does not wake but dreams of waisted frocks,
wide hips, foals, fiddles, harvest suppers.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Stir Your Best Lines

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Gail Nason

for Susan

if no line is less than twice
and two becomes one four becomes three
am i in a pantoum
warning a poem is coming

two becomes one four becomes three
i have been divided from sleep
warning a poem is coming
dementia can be gleeful

i have been divided from sleep
stir don’t shake those little grey cells
dementia is gleeful
somewhere I have travelled gladly

sir don’t shake
I am unsettled in a pigeonhole
somewhere I have travelled gladly
like a tourist in my home

i settle in a pigeonhole
where my best lines are someone else’s
like a tourist in my own home
let me crawl into a crevice

if your best lines are someone else’s
if no line is less than twice
let me sink into a crevice
i am in a pantoum

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

sting-along

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Joanne Burns

there’s no point to owning a country
if you can’t look after your own hair
the tv burped the weeks broke up like packets
of biscuits we swept through them on the way
to the bus stop holidays were full of conjunctions
forget the piles of prepositions i ate crime novels
with a plate of siestas my signature slid around
like a post-mexican wave; the insects were almost
worse than centrelink on every windowsill after
dark the film about the poet with a neat little
notebook no crossings out was too cute for
words i got sunburnt in the shade between
the mango and the bacon the soles of my best
$200 sandals fell to pieces like archived echoes
during a free speech on heart attacks send
a photo to our address in the bible belt advised
the manufacturer the dog didn’t eat the housework
it just got lost time to vacate the vacation i forgot
that my new super dental floss is not an astral chord

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

The Dark Placebo

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Philip Salom

Placebo: if resolutions are like insights
I must make them only to lose them.
Do I lose more than can be made?
If things gained are better felt
when lost: their shadow falls
as the proof of things
worsening.

Placebo-fear is the strangest seduction.
Cold corners reach out just for you.
The cold wooden floor creaking
in the middle of the night. It
could be someone leaving
or entering. Inner winter
has its fever.

It’s all the other things that are not
the thing itself. Placebos as twins
of Ariel, Caliban. White as our
pills the white placebo will
duel our mind against
our body – invoking
the ghost of drugs
makes us well.

But dark placebo: hair rises on your neck
the dead the ghost as white as a pill
in the dark. And the dark placebo
makes your mind hallucinate
your body. So its taking
real drugs for nothing
makes you worse.

Nocebo stands giant as the blades of a wind farm
whirling dead eagles down into paddocks
inside us. Worsely better for its darkness…
It is the patron saint of masochists.
It’s the endless bad luck at cards.
Oh pity you, it insists, this is
the dark placebo’s
ghost.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Hook

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Nathan Curnow

I discovered a bird with a hook in its mouth,
which is really just a cheap opening line.
‘Cheap’ will evoke the sound of the bird.
Like me you have to question the point.
I’m tugging but it’s such a rusty hook.
I should’ve mentioned that from the start.
Find a gap higher up, try easing it in.
If it doesn’t fit come back and go on.
Where do you expect the bird to be?
I’ve made up a nest in the laundry.
There’s a friendly vet in a nearby village
but they’re called towns, this is not England.
So I wake at night with a drop feeder.
I’m having trouble but misspelt ‘trouble’.
Instead I wrote ‘ruble’, then corrected it.
That’s not an image, just a footnote.
Every strong line must snap somewhere.
And now we’re all stuck in the laundry.
What are the bones? A bird, an old hook,
or the audience in my head which is ruble?
Help! Your blasted shadow’s in the way,
something longs to be free from my grip,
twisting the hook of a made up bird.
No telling how to get you out.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Touch Screen

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Stephen Edgar

And like a scene in which the primitive
Enters the house and hardly comprehends
The way the masters live,
So do the first two days of ours unfold.
We look around wide-eyed,
Housesitting an apartment for some friends
In all its electronically applied
And hard-wired luxury, iPad-controlled.

A touch screen will indulge our every need,
Or idle wish—the merest thought of it
And we are remedied.
The lighting, air-conditioning, TV,
Blinds, awnings, radio,
Hi-fi: on/off, up/down, loud/soft—commit
A finger to the screen and it is so,
Our functions disembodied, virtually.

And then, outside those glass and (strange to tell)
Hand-operated heavy sliding doors
We strenuously propel
Apart to make a wall of vacant space,
The city is displayed
In panorama which our gaze explores
With an extravagance that’s half-afraid
We’ll blink and find it gone without a trace:

The glassy skyline among which St Mary’s
Presents a stone entreaty for the past;
There, skewering midair is
The tower of Centrepoint, positioned where
It claims the centre lies;
Pan right, the bridge and, not to be outclassed,
The Opera House, that permanent surprise;
The green approach to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair;

Closer, here are the docks of Woolloomooloo,
And, right below our eyes, the naval base,
At which the QM2
Appears one morning, and is gone the next,
As though it had not been,
Like something one might conjure and replace
With just a finger’s touch upon the screen—
A trick to leave us neophytes perplexed.

The light performs its spectral repertoire
From dawn all day to evening. In between
The perpendicular
And cut-out towers, insertions of midheaven
Will sometimes put on view
A slowly moving plane, which seems to mean
To glide by, not behind them, but clean through,
A floating revenant of Nine Eleven.

The harbour shifts its dazzle to and fro.
At night the Opera House appears to shine
With sunlight’s afterglow.
This hand I raise and stretch, is that to scroll
The image, or adjust
The settings to accord with our design?
Content as novices, we watch and trust
In what’s unfolding there beyond control.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

Blueprint No. 1: Siemon St.

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Zenobia Frost

The only place I ever lived
alone, but slept myself out
of the memory. My room
crammed with king-frame
more manspread than bed-
spread – creamy linen sheets
but no quilt. The bed clothed
entirely in light. The window
doubled as front door. Thin
curtains lifted in the honey-
vinegar of swollen mangoes,
which split like lightning split
the street in two. Beyond,
wine-bottle storms doused
the room in green petrichor.
The night’s lapping tongue
and sleepless groove – an
inseparable expanse of lines.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

The Secret Council of Raphael and Michael

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Michael Aiken

A secret cave in the glacial
wastes
of gas and air stretching beyond all comprehending:
a light, tiny, unwavered,
the faint glow a beacon to that
chiefest coven of principals, prior
to the fall the greatest array
of lordly wings in Heaven.
Lit down lonely in secluded arrival
the five dominions accepted by
the cavern, gather in quiet counsel
with Raphael and Michael.

With grave and self-made drama
the Chamberlain relates the scene made
by Satan at their door
earlier that day.
Murmuration and constrated faces
the archangel turned to speak:

“If that time should come, an
angel fallen reclaim Heaven,
no god nor crucified may hope
to save us. He coming home
turns off the light; it is over, once
the prodigal returns. The world
is nothing but a test
for evil to do its worst. The lord
created Earth as a battlefield for us
to contest. But if ever the enemy
succeeds in crossing it entirely
we are lost. All creation will cave
behind him, lost stars fall, collapsing
in his wake,
and Earth too.
This babe is nothing but a ruse; whatever
the truth of his remorse, immovably
the fact persists: by any way
should Satan regain Heaven,
we are lost.
We must drive him back. Like the
legend of Magonus, let us gather
sticks, clubs, to beat the serpent-in-disguise
and guide him back to Hell.”

“You mean to kill a child?”
this duke of Heaven near faints away
and Raphael is pained. “This
is no child. This is Satan, unrepentant,
intent on fooling God.
He cannot win
by force, and so he seeks by guile
to corrupt the natural order, to swindle our sweet father
in allowing him return.
What then? What would happen to the princes of Heaven,
to God’s Right Hand, if his first right hand regrew?
Where will we go, we who opposed with righteous fire
his usurpation all ages before? If God forgives him
need that mean he forgives us? Nowhere is that written.
No time was that said. Satan remains Satan, enemy to all,
intent to destroy creation, everything
he cannot have or own.”
“What would you have us do?” one junior in the hierarchy
filled with urgent zeal.
“Watch, for now” said Raphael “and wait for that time
when we may press and turn him away
from his paradise.”
Their leader drew in dirt around their feet: “For now
this child must know disconcert, synchronous
with natural harmony. Make him displeased
to exist in his skin, make him a mocker
of all he belongs.”

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged

These Hills

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Dimitra Harvey

that enclose my days, open up ahead, like a book.
And I watch a ship on the sea’s blank page – a fugitive
full stop – write itself into refracted light

and vanish. Clouds blot and then tear across
the sun. Bees scrawl in the long petals
of fuchsia heath bursting from rocks

like asterisks. Walking here, I saw the forest
flowers beginning to open. What offering
can I make on a hard winter’s outer edge, word

thin, hands empty? This overhang offers me
its scripts of moss, its winking stone. It steps into blue air,
above a drop that would crumple me like paper.

Posted in 80: NO THEME VI | Tagged