Longevity

By | 1 August 2012
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.
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Lisa Jacobson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her verse novel, The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press), won the 2014 Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award. This book was also shortlisted for four other national awards: the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Stella Prize, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and, as a manuscript, for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press), was shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. In 2011 she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the U.S. and the U.K. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. Her new poetry collection, South in the World (UWA Publishing) will be released later this year (2014). She lives in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

http://www.lisajacobson.org

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