States of Poetry 2017

Just leave your mark here

I won’t do you no wrong
I’m a man that you can trust
I’m not like the others
I’m a honourable man

Some people say
there’s no honour among thieves
but let me tell you straight
We, guberment men,
sent by the King we steal their land
by one stroke of the mighty pen.
But don’t tell anybody that.

The Poetry Exam

The hall begins to fill. The students sit.
She sets her papers neatly on the desk
and rolls the lines around her mouth, flits
from word to word, moves her lips. The rest

is left to memory. The tests are stacked
for passing out on perfect, icy lines
of tables set in single file, tables packed
away when half-right answers whine

submergence

I was all angle once
sharp and schist-like
a spiked rock dragon-back
arching into air

too late you learn    the long
wash of days    given grist enough
finds your fissures
chafes them    wide

these days   knowing    I wade
in a rising tide    of blo ...

What you get when you search for silence

(poem composed of Hansard search results from November 1962)

one of his colleagues has gone into a significant silence
to silence us, but this is having no effect

listen in silence
spoken and heard in silence

the Prime Minister has observed an unusual silence on this matter. There was an old Australian ...

Hammam

(translated from a Persian ghazal by Rabi’a Balkhi)

I am back, locked up in this love again,
all my daring escapes end here.

Love is a broad shoreless sea
tell me, o wise ones, who swims it and lives?

To take love all the way
you must embrace every horror;

adore ugliness like a fair face;
make sweet delight of poiso ...

some trees

spotted gum
tall classy lady
cradling a listing turpentine

(shaggy old top-heavy
barrel-chested nuisance)
she props him

takes the strain
holds her own line almost true
that’s what you get

when you get
married in a windstorm
but the wind always changes

strands you in strange attitudes
let him slid ...

The colour of eyes

For Banduk Marika, Aboriginal artist

1. After your story of the funeral, August 1991

Black, Banduk, is the colour of eyes
like night shrunk
when grandma tidies after grief.
Perhaps she could not spill
to stain the room.

Black, Banduk,
this quaver fisted
in her throat –
it has no moon,
it ache ...

After the Grand Canyon

18 October 2014

It’s an accident
of composition: sun, sky, bird.
White orb on storm grey
punctuated by a raven –
but which composes which,
and which is accidental?
Is it the sun
a hole
sucking in a bird,
or Icarus about
to singe the sun?
Against the grey
both soft and ...

Grammar Lesson

There should be a name for the special case
in which we say ‘the crowd marvelled’,
if the roar that rose
over the back of the stadium walls
over the rain-shingled streets
conveys the sense that what mattered
on the pitch, or the court, happened
in the eyes that watched it;

that indicates a place has changed
fo ...

In Place of a Bio

Can we not take all these prizes as given?
The awards, fellowships and accolades
that greeted an awaited first book, the driven
milestones of a talent in spades?
Must everyone describe the same lookouts
from Parnassus’ slopes, Calliope’s redoubts?

When all are gods, let the lame smith stand forth:
just for once, couldn’t th ...