Poem

'Home' by Judith Bishop

by Judith Bishop •

November 2016, no. 386

Poem

'Home' by Judith Bishop

by Judith Bishop •

November 2016, no. 386

Be our heart’s north,
daybreak in our daughters’
breath, be the radiance
that listens
as we gather for the singing
of the wood.

Here is night. Somewhere,
to someone, fear is coming:
dark calls out the human
animal. Somewhere,
in someone, the animal
runs forth.

By night the wood sings.
In its radiance we find
ourselves altered.
Somewhere in the night
our hearts settle
and the breath alone keeps watch.

Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2011.

Judith Bishop

By this contributor

Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third poetry collection, Circadia, is forthcoming from UQP in 2024. Judith’s awards include the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize forInterval and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poems have been used as lyrics for compositions including Jane Stanley’s ‘14 Weeks’ for the Glasgow School of Art Choir (2023), ‘The Indifferent’ for the Hermes Experiment (2024), Andrew Ford’s ‘Isolation Hymn’ (2021), and Mastaneh Nazarian’s ‘Aubade’ (2019). Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia, and has studied in the United States and Britain. She currently works in Advancement at La Trobe University and is writing a book about AI and human data.