Persephone
How can I tell her, my own mother,
that I long for the autumn to turn?
When I first take his seeds upon my tongue
I gag, but soon I swallow them with ease.
The earth swallows me in turn.
The bright world fades, means nothing.
I give it scant thought.
Demeter
I am your mother.
What else can I do but wait?
Though I gnaw at the branch
of the tree outside my room
which bears no fruit,
until my gums are bleeding.
Will nothing hasten your return
or the tree’s first shoots of green?
I have waited out more winter days
than I care to count.
I wring my hands until the bones grate,
my menses cease with the seasons
and only death to all things
will quell my nerves.
About Lisa Jacobson
Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, was released in 2012 by Five Islands Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Award and, as a manuscript, for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth, was published by Five Islands Press in 1995 and shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards.
She has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and an Australia Council Grant to complete her next poetry collection.
Her poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, New York and London. Her work is represented in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (U.K.), Peter Porter’s The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Scorched: Penguin’s Australian Summer Stories and Robert Adamson’s The Best Australian Poems 2010. Her poem, “Girls and Horses in the Fire” was selected as the epigraph for the highly acclaimed Kinglake 350 by Adrian Hyland (Text, 2012).
She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe.
She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.
Website:http://www.fiveislandspress.comFurther reading:
