Let there be snow My beloved tucks her hair under a pillow of smiles Let there be snow My beloved sleeps in the open like a morning star Let there be snow My beloved shields the olive tree where the Master knelt to pray Let there be snow My beloved tames the wind – a … Continue reading
Jad El Hage is a Lebanese / Australian poet, novelist and playwright. He published his first creative works of poetry in 1966. He has worked as a journalist since he was sixteen, and also as a book editor and radio-broadcaster in Beirut, Paris (Radio Monte Carlo), Athens (Harlequin Arab World), London (BBC World Service) and Sydney. … Continue reading
the hued emerald thickets of desire to lace fling themselves have a cold like at the vigilante this one? in the air doves i’the ask the developed world shade about life & ambitions suffer s punishment for being a lovely per son a weak friend this is not all a mass high-five or even people fatigue mum said rest dream of a in … Continue reading
The intervals between trains are shrinking, streetlights shaking — one or two blink out with every repercussion. Planes fly lower and lower, guard dogs whimper, and every so often a seismograph flutters as if to warn us that the orbits are out of whack, that waves rake the ocean floors and the hairs on the … Continue reading
Bottles in gutters, alley cats on the slink under streetlamps that crystallise in the corners of my eyes — shopping trolleys gliding by like giant legless ice skates — this brittle night taken out of the fridge — it’s spring but cold still, still as glass. Sobering up, a breeze … Continue reading
for my father; and his Sucking dentures, whistling ‘A Boy Named Sue’, my father constructed cold frames, terminuses —one metre x one metre x one metre, four facets, and a crown, hinged and flat, threaded with sparkling wire—of the dark Goliath dwarfing his father’s orchard since seventy-seven. Come winter they’d clack like men across a … Continue reading
for Michelle Cahill Some evenings are this fragile. Rainbow lorikeets court baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote to wrap my limbs. Morning will sprinkle the conifers, Which of us abandoned the other? We cannot answer with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth? Some days we trust more than desire, … Continue reading
Stuart Barnes is a Tasmanian-born, Queensland-based poet whose writing appears in a variety of publications. He is Poetry Editor of Tincture Journal and Verity La. In 2014 he co-judged the ACT Publishing Awards’ poetry category and was named Runner-up in the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. He blogs at http://stuartabarnes.tumblr.com/ … Continue reading
(in memory of Val Plumwood) The sound of crows is known to us for its mournfulness, its insistent black edge to a bright world. There was a day when she stepped into a clearing and surprised crows at their other speech, the cheerful joyous rapture they know from time to time when no one is … Continue reading
Hanging upside down perched in its own Heaven the cricket sings: “I have eaten and am full. This is good.” Does it sing for us? Possibly. If we too have been touched all over by fire If we have balanced for hours on the infinite porosity of earth and know what it’s like to be … Continue reading
Apologising to unicorns is problematic. They rarely understand our purposes. Tenderness will often be seen as the manipulative gestures of a fear that seeks death – for itself and others. Unicorns sleep most comfortably in heavy traffic where the hum of self-absorbed commuters leaves them invisible. To find a unicorn in a forest is like … Continue reading
Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I … Continue reading
Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne in 1951 and has lived most of his life in Sydney. He is a poet and translator of Spanish and French poetry. He has worked most of his life as a teacher, first in high schools and then with NSW TAFE. His sixth collection of poetry, Towns in the … Continue reading
Anyone who has died that I knew: I can feel their essence. Still here. It’s not a thought or a memory I am having. It’s a feeling. They are here, with me. They are abiding. My grandmothers, my grandfather, my dearest father. Even the boy who fell off a cliff when I was at school. … Continue reading
Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher to an inch of rain. For weeks, I’ve watched you plane the sky’s bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes into a straight-cut … Continue reading
There is no Poet of the Month for December. This month we shall indulge in new poems, for some of the wonderful poets that I featured as Poet of the Month in 2014. It has been an absolute pleasure for me to get to read and of course to share their poetry. You can find … Continue reading
She looked so pretty in her blue jacket and shoes. Colours make me happy, she said. And you make me happy, I said. Or I wish that’s what I had said. All the colours have passed out of her now, like blue leaves drifting down from the trees. © Richard James Allen “Explosively powerful … Continue reading
For Chee and Stephen Who I was in the past, Who I will be in the future – What distractions these are From who I am now. Who I am now, Here, with you. In this moment, You have rewritten my past. You are rewriting my future. What I don’t understand about Who I was … Continue reading
of course the trees are my friends they are like me ~ busy busy bees growing in slow motion they embrace me when I enter the garden they remember that I water them they teach me how to be still they teach me how to be busy busy busy only very very slowly they teach … Continue reading
for Karen Your beauty cannot be translated, but I would fail not to try. It generates a weather no meteorology can describe. It is most like a flower, a flower with moods. An unstill life, in no need of arranging, it arranges itself. It is not fixed, so how can I fix it? It doesn’t … Continue reading
Poem and Dish 