Here you will discover a small selection of poems published in various print and online journals.
‘Tide Diary’ Australian Poetry Journal, Vol 11 No.1 2021
In the lee of the peninsula,
tangles of stilt roots brace against
the drag of sea-bound water.
As if an invisible hand is emptying
out the bath of the bay,
the mangroves hurriedly knit and net
their slurry of things left behind
like witches’ keepings – a harbour of leaves,
flower heads and seeds adrift.
From the convoy of things floating past,
they trap yellows and oranges –
colours of decay and sunlight – kept for offerings
to the estuary and her gown of light.
In amongst the silt and mud and layers,
they are at home in this busyness;
their toes lost in the soft silk fabric of sediment.
Schools of fish emerge from the shadow
nests of roots synchronised to planetary rotations.
They feel time cranking its wheel of the tide
its hourly demands to breed, to hunt, or die –
mangroves siphoning the cloudy water
that hides where we’ve been and gone
UNMOTHERING: Shortlist for Newcastle Poetry Prize 2018, Published ‘Buying Online’ Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, 2018
‘This is what I have made of it. This!
…What, indeed?’ Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
If you stand in front of a glacier
you will hear it pop and groan
as it grinds over the stratum of rocks beneath.
Moving at glacial speed it is quicker
than both you and I can imagine.
Great shards of ice calving
before its advance.
My sons have been leaving me my whole life.
In pieces, like fragments of ice or retina –
they have been slipping from my vision,
like words I can no longer read.
They walk before me into the long days
of adulthood; they do not turn.
I remember women talking.
Mothers. We dreamt of our children
as small and hungry parasites.
H. R. Giger aliens writhing within,
taking our teeth, hair and our bones.
Most days, we gave them up willingly.
Surrendered them to the garden,
to places outside.
Now, I am unmothering,
I would curl them back into me.
My imperfect, beautiful sons.
On the topic of global warming
and glacial retreat, the women are silent.
We are all watching my young men,
now model citizens before the state,
as they bend to secure crampons and tie laces.
And in the hours of their mistakes
I no longer know when to speak,
when to be silent,
or if they can hear
the screams in my head,
the desperate hours
as they walk ahead.
If you stand in front of the glacier
you can hear it pop and groan.
It is the sound of great canyons
and fissures opening between us.
PANACEA POETS series from the Queensland Poetry Festival – a COVID TIME Reading
Eating the Reef Not Very Quiet: the anthology (Pacey, M, Renew, S eds 2021)
Solomon Islands, Uepi
Adrift, pursuing phantoms of lost habitats
we pursue wilderness until it is no more.
I am eating the reef.
At first, it is sweet and expansive –
like meditation, or the rush of oxygen
after holding the breath.
Ocean so blue it is sky and sea at once –
cobalt blues gas the coppers
of midnight snapper,
following courses electric
of bluefin trevally and barracuda;
we submerge and are joyfully lost.
Powder fire of faecal matter
scatters down like talcum
as fish accelerate
and weave the ocean’s current
that silts glorious accretions
of sucker-mouthed worms and corals.
I hang trawler nets of grief and avarice
and fill them with fish.
Quartets of seniors float
in the channel’s shallows like plastic
bottles eddying the pier.
Masks full, they stand and crunch coral –
the newly buoyant flail.
Deeper out, I float
the surfaces of black tip reef sharks
and wish for blood,
or for the lips of giant clams
to swallow us whole.
‘An Open Door’ Cordite 52: Interlocutor
‘One More Feather and I’ll Fly’ Cordite 56:No Theme II
Cocky Bennett was a sulphur-crested Cockatoo who lived to the ripe old age of 119 years. After a life of seafaring he came to live at the Seabreeze Hotel at Tom Ugly’s Point, Sydney – where he died in May 1916. The bird had been featherless for much of its life due to suspected Psittacine disease. Cocky was stuffed by Taxidermists ‘Tost and Rohu’ and now resides with the Kogarah Historical Society.
A sentence of one hundred and nineteen years
reveals a portrait of the bird as a pirate.
A claw-beaked sailor of dark brews and beers,
purveyor of bawdy discourse, bar-room brawler.
He circumnavigates the wiry longitudes of his cage,
pale and puckered, scant feathers whorl
and stub pink cockatoo skin as if the cook
had left mid-pluck. The drinkers gather,
they offer profanities as plumage and gawk
at his status as living kitsch, ‘One at a time,
gentlemen, please! Let me think!’
As a centenarian, Cocky’s earned his shrine
in the cabinet of quirk and circumstance.
Now he’s dead they’ve glassed him in.
One hundred and nineteen years. A sentence
twice caged – in life and in death,
tethering freedom in case a bird might fly,
or explore a feather’s breadth.