Two poems

The Aluminium Apples of the Moon

My skin’s the tarnished

silver filigree of ferns

under a waning sky,

reflecting light pale

from its long trip

from sun to moon to earth.

Luna’s my long-lost mother;
I hunger for her milk

that lies thick as metal cream

over the brackish cold tea

of the creek. It’s slathered

on the ti-tree trunks as well,

profligate and white as death.

One levitating night,

I’ll rise into the air

and through the void.

My crescent fangs will pierce
the aluminium apples of the moon
and I will suck their juice.

Jenny Blackford

____________

The drowned brickworks

Waterbirds swim glossy spirals

into duckweed and pondscum
in the drowned brickworks,

the rootless ancient weeds greener

than any grass could grow on this

our wide brown southern land.

If dead could see again,

the coal-flecked miners shipped down here

from colder northern towns
would drop their jaws to find

that their old bones had dug

a perfect clay-lined swimming pool

for purple swamphens’ bolshie chicks

and snake-necked cormorants in black and white, 

shiny-small coots, moorfowl

and fifty sorts of duck.

The weed’s thick-layered onto the water,

slathered by the sky’s bright knife.

The birds don’t care.
An aerial wood-duck makes a splashlanding;

clockwork crested pigeons whirr musical

to perch on half-drowned walls.

The played-out coal seam

sandwiched by thick slabs

of creamy ochre clay

in fossil layer-cake of cliff

stares down grey-grim inscrutable.
Can it miss the honks and dives

of plesiosaurs at play
in shallow ancient seas?

Jenny Blackford