Poem

Portraits of the Future

by Judith Bishop •

November 2020, no. 426

Poem

Portraits of the Future

by Judith Bishop •

November 2020, no. 426

i.
Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!
A black photo
where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.
Never in all history
was such a portent visible
without a guiding star.

ii.
Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life.
One tells me what I need to know.
One tells me what I want.
No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death.
I sense that they are holding back.
Turn around, slowly: I want to see your hands.

iii.
Once I slept in a caravan
and heard the breathing ocean.
Dreams were the province of a dandelion curtain.
Now come the frail parasols,
drifting on a screen;
now come the waves,
rolling my hearing into guttural caves.
I have opened
the case for convenient sleep.
The child I was listens,
laughs and weeps.

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.