Pastoral Editorial

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Stuart Cooke

When we began throwing around ideas for this issue, the notion of 'Pastoral' first came up as a joke. Because ever since god knows when, for reasons that always seem to depend on one's thoughts regarding the generation of '68, Australian pastoral poetry has often been affiliated with the hackneyed, with the excessively sentimental, and with the sweeping visions of European imperialism.

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Dove Cottage

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Trisha Pender

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, of course,
Although I did proffer some choice morsels
Dove Cottage Maxim 14 [rejected]:
You can never have too much laudanum.
Wm's recall of M Wollstonecraft selective, as usual.
Dove Cottage Maxim 7:
Never confuse theory and practice.
DCM 8:
Never confuse poetry with reality.
Earlier in the evening we had braved a brisk wind
To go lie in a ditch covered with twigs.
I thought it was pretty lame at first
But after the first couple of hours I got into the swing of it.
There are many ways to induce hallucinations
But lying in a ditch covered in twigs was a new one for me.
I'm still pissed, though, that we never get to play the games
I want to play.

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Back to the Farm

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Oliver Ackland

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 time.
Tell me how to leave.

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Round Up. Make Nice

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Oliver Ackland

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 waltz panic.
Grind their teeth,
Loose their feet and
Shout.

Slow lace choir smoke oils.
The machines that blur
day and night
swing almighty heavy orange hands.

Light of heart friends trade
damaged rope,
throw scotch bottle bookends.
Tireless light bulbs,
painted glue stories.

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Paddocks

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Nicholas Powell

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 of speech, wind-
blown pages from a broken spine.

I try
to fly there, opening and closing
a little wingspan of speech, wind-
blown pages from a broken spine.

Say, I try to say
my first name backwards.
Or call Now by the name Then,
and it does not come.

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Variations in the Pupils

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Nicholas Powell

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 surfaces

until the landscape is commonplace,
bathed in a hot haze that plays
at the edges, until objects swim

on the road, in drought.
The bones know a heavy rain
will soon fall.

Say it is a grey illusion, that soon
the clouds will be bruised purple
and we will turn in our candlelit smallness

to our haphazard guesswork,
counting the seconds
between lightning and thunder.

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On Reading ‘Learning Human’

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Sue Stanford

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. He can
even whistle his way inside a mechanical warbler.

On boiling cloud days the whole landscape is
his change of clothes. To gloss the painful
rift between the self and not, what's truly
seen is mouthed, tongued, brightened with
the spittle of a word. More, he fumbles
into its sleeves; leaks soul stuff, as only
those for whom the flesh is also raiment can.

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Lamentation

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Anne Elvey

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 this night's morning
things burn out past giving
(too tired to forgive)

the murray the murray
heavy metal of retreat
a bellow to set the flesh on

edge a leaching (some things
need to be held back)
the sediment lift

ash of excess
seep spoil bone and flesh
the invisible density

of dissolution the silent lamentation
of a drowning fish
the o of loss

o murray o murray
a gull and a swan
from different vantage

one skimming squawking
one all dip and glide
and underwater webbed motor

bogged by
drinking food in you
(given

for our breath)
spoils bone and flesh
drowning the word in you

the murray the murray
in the beak of a gull
threads cotton and rice

too tired to forgive
and sea (does it know)
bends and breaks

ready to admit
the heavy (lifted) metal
o murray o murray

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Post-colonial?

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Anne Elvey

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
too much the saying of what we have called
selves (the being here of us) a creek a wall
(the snows melting) the water over. Or,

tomorrow you find us building a hut
of limbs and thatch, stripped gum, old bark, fragrant
litter of leaves, the floor dry and crawling.

Tomorrow you find us building a falling,
the odour of crushed ants, the living urgent,
assessing loss (a lean-to, its skin shut?)

Posted in 33: PASTORAL | Tagged

Overlander Ode

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Joyce Parkes

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
language could claim and cover?

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practical project

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Cristina Silaghi

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 sovereign sleep
dragging me towards the top of this building
 
 

II

you hear names they never knew
ivy and impatiens
yet can't remember
snow tiptoes on the valleys
blanket upon blanket
lost and found between satellite dishes
red centaurs take their time
indifferently repeated
while your alkaline soul turns over
a fragmentary signal
in the world of small changes

 
 

I

kneel for no cause
smile with no purpose
endless supply of grandmothers waving
petals and ties
the passport i forgot
dial hold step aside
and kiss on a grass-green pillow
the music will start in a minute
a window to a house with a door from the summer room
ivy and impatiens
with burnished clay riesling bells
there is almost always a slope however slight
a window
looking down to
blind whispers of
two fences clothes pegs guests in yellow and blue
above the silky dreams of insectivores

Posted in 33: PASTORAL | Tagged

Shift

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Jane Williams

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 challenged to build something reverent look my family over for similar signs but it's hard to tell the rain gauge is the centre of attention walk on water or drown –

the plan for the tower is almost real enough

to put down on paper

there'll be soft places to dig the footings

a greening before a ripe moon

enough blood

to set the first stone in place

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