States of Poetry 2017
Paris Evening
13 November 2015
It is Friday, around five. He is
strolling on the rue Voltaire, flâneur
for the young century. The afternoon is crumbling,
the trees are shutting down for winter,
leaves pirouetting to the street
and cracking like small bones beneath his feet.
All around him, the streetlights are coming on,
can ...
‘You Never Said It’s A Race, Dad!’
Oh, but it’s a race all right, trust me, kid, that
hill he almost managed to beat you to the
top of (‘Rubbish!’) challenged him more than you, de-
spite all the picnic
stuff he made you carry in your Batman rucksack.
It’s a race to find all the spare parts, becoming
antiques, puzzling kids in the bike sh ...
Holly and Will
1972
John Foulcher
...Before the Storm
John Foulcher
...Mark, Pauline and Me
1970
John Foulcher
...The Undiscovered Country
tears itself from its own body
Minos condemns it to the seventh abyss.
wherever Fortune casts it, and there
it germinates, like a dropped grain of spelt.
...
The leaves here are not green, ...
After Reming
Super typhoon 2006
‘Purple.
Unlike any that I’ve seen,’
Mother says.
‘Behind an iron gate
beside an immense hole
on the ground,
but no house.’
She pauses,
and I’m suddenly
beside the purple
behind the gate
in the hole
in the house,
led by the definite article,
thus defini ...
An argument in glass
For Jenni Kemarre Martiniello,
Aboriginal glassmaker
As you hold me,
you think your fingers know
I’m glass magic,
this slip and slide on cool satin,
then suddenly I’m water
and an eternity of greens —
O song of sea flowers,
you make drowning
beautiful.
Or so you say.
But what of other ...
Lucy afloat
After the scattering of ashes
Pulpit Rock, 26 November 2014
And then the light
on these layers of grief,
grit, glow
that make a rock.
From blinding white
to ochre soft, then rust
and pink
running into each other —
who knows which colour came first
or if the glow came
before the grit
...
No name or rank supplied
We’re looking down the barrel of
a.303 Lee Enfield,
standard issue through until
the early 1960s.
The others in the firing squad
have all been cropped away, it seems.
He is an officer, we think –
that small, smart cap betrays him.
His hair’s well-trimmed and business-like;
he seems somehow unduly clea ...