States of Poetry Poems
The world is breaking
driving through the falling dark somewhere bombs are falling
and I want to show you where I came from
point to the purple hills and the darkening trees
the night condensing on the fields
But you are sleeping, or pretending to
The world is breaking
I would like to say that once this
ringed in valley was all the world and cuppe ...
I swim through obscure water to the far bank where
trees hunch searching reflections in muddy currents
I crawl beneath greening branches beside dark bracken
spiky cycads stare out at the people on the other side
They lie spread on sparsely grassed sand congregated
by this inland river beneath incongruous beach umbrellas
They stumble through shallows on ...
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
Henry Hill, Goodfellas
I am in a Martin Scorsese film – except I’m not
In 1972 I was in a bar with my gangster friends
having my gangster laughs and we were
Kings among men – ‘You’re a funny guy!’
I shouted we shouted guns sleeping restlessl ...
(after William Shakespeare, Richard III Act 1, Scene 1)
this winter of our discontent
dead leaves scutter on roads
sad! no one is sadder than me
the sun reports winter as
summer – fake news!
winds carry chill of snow
I won some victories
made crowns of branches
bruised arms stripped bare
fool trees ask the sky for care
Adlubescence, n. Pleasure,
delight
1. April day in Canberra, fog in the morning
lifts, sunshine, moon
&nb ...
I set out one morning to return a book and five years later I have not returned; face
pressed into the dirty skin of the Earth. In the bushes I stare from scrubby branches skin
angry with red rashes trace paths travelled. I remember two of the things I left behind –
a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and a poem I wrote in Mexico. Tears catch in my eyes
at sunset ...
Miranda Lello is a Canberra poet and performer whose début poetry collection, A Song, The World To Come, was published in March 2017 by Recent Work Press. It took thirty-five years to write, and Miranda launche ...
we write small poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –
all this to make sense of
the random moments
parading past our hearts
in chaos. instead
we should write poems
make pots that shatter –
if not in fire then falling
from careless hands –
< ...
(first stanza after Rosemary Dobson’s Over the Frontier)
The pot I imagine
is always better
than the one
I make.
But after all these years
my hands are learning
how to work cla ...
1 They know the subtler shades of green and where each one belongs;
2 and some reds:
ochre, orange and something aching towards crimson –
all in a single patch;
3 &nb ...