Epic Lunar Perigee The skin of Earth itches, twitches, wrinkles as tectonic plates move. Volcanic acne spew lava, smoke, move people far away to safety.   Up north, snow-bound, derailed, people hibernate. Down south, sapped of all energy, with threat of fire and flood, we estivate, craving relief.   Tides are very high and low, […]

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Going for a Burton I hear you sighing through the curtain. I see you singing on the stair. I know most nights I’m in your sights. I feel it when I douse the lights. I feel it everywhere. Now here, now there, without a care, Your silver skin, your golden hair, So young, so yare, […]

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Cushion Moss The sad paragraphs in the paper offer no answers but they fade a little once I’m outside although there’s rain in the air and the sudden sun silvering naked twigs as I enter the park doesn’t last. I’m in the copse where rooks are flapping in quarrel as usual, when it stops me […]

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David   They buried him   in a spanking new graveyard between two concrete paths: a man who loved the bush nurtured native plants sowed eucalypts where he could.   Six men lowered the coffin in a hammock of ropes. Until it stuck: they had overlooked that shoulders always need the broader end of the […]

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Family Photograph: 1949   I’m with my family in Peak Hill Park. I’m five and in my smooth cheeked introspective phase.   I’m with my aunt, born a blue baby. I often studied her for sky traces, but my mother called it rude to stare.   I was convinced my aunt hid blueness with rouge […]

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Australia Needs a Poet Laureate Steven Schwartz[1] Oxford-educated and possessed of considerable charm, Michael Massey Robinson was a rogue and a scoundrel.[2] Convicted of extortion in London, he was sentenced to death in 1796. Luckily for him, convicts with his education were desperately needed in Britain’s antipodean colony. So, instead of dangling from a noose, […]

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An Interesting Little Girl   An interesting little girl … The Argus read.   Further down, … hearing she was seriously ill, I volunteered to ride to Melbourne …   At a schoolhouse, gathering, May 18th 1851, … a full congregation of settlers heard the service … … but the Reverend P. Gunn had to […]

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Brief* Garden Here I sit, in my lamplit bungalow, with the warm thick rain drumming on the roof and leaking through the holes, with a glass of gin … and from the boys’ quarters the tentative tooting of flutes. Donald Friend, Diaries, May 13, 1958   We turn off from the Galle Road to the […]

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Janice B. Seventeen years old. I kissed you, And you kissed me, And (it seems unbelievable When I look back) I was too shy and gauche To take it any further.   Why didn’t I think, After that totally unexpected night, To call you back next day, tell you To dump your boyfriend?   Maybe […]

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Confeatheration   The mud-bank off the Island mid-river, Enlarged at low tide Gathers water-birds in a Meeting, often presided By up to five pelicans.   Even at high tide There’ll be two or three senators With many lesser water-birds, Noisy, assertive gulls Never at a loss, Resting, ruminating, digesting.   Valerie Murray

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