There are ghosts of me here,
and a trace of the old circle
in the grass my father mowed
so we girls could ride our horses
in the park. We reach the metal
gate that leads up to the paddock
and beyond, the house where I
lived when young.
‘I often pause my walking
here to take a rest,’ you say.
‘This road, this house.’
I called out once, at this very gate
to a God I wasn’t sure was there.
And thirty years later here you are:
the odd longevity of prayer.
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:
