Poem
(Italian, c.17th; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
Life breathes in this painting like a child
pretending not to be awake,
or a skink metamorphosed to a stone
but for the flutter in its flank.
You have to lean and listen for the heart
behind the shining paint,
the lips half-open, and the glittering eye.
Velvet of the night. A ba ...
I stare from my study window into trees.
Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill
White seeds across the rubble where the barn
Towered over us with its cracked spire
For almost half a century until
Some feckless pot-head changed
The whole thing into fire.
canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata
where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block
It wounds, this shift of scale.
As I stand on the balls of my feet
back on my heels only once
to keep even for the painting
and myself clear from excess
of feeling: balanced to look
and half hearing her sleepily say:
I. Claim
Wild birds rise before us, making the noise of a multitude clapping hands.
The men fire, fire again and still they rise, they rise clear out of range and
where they were they leave such wakes of light, they are tearing the blue-black
shadows out of the river; their wing tumult is shadows escaping air. Act
flung back to motives, they arc away from us and scatter till I am fierce
for what I cannot remember and still they rise, the vault is dark with their applause.
The Collected Verse Of Mary Gilmore: Volume 1 1887–1929 edited by Jennifer Strauss
The Universe Looks Down by Chris Wallace-Crabbe & Read It Again by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Being from a young nation you find that dawn beguiles you
onto the exhausted saltmarsh,
miles of morose vacuity clad
in couch grass, cottonweed, random puddles, wire
and the odd, triumphant
flourish of pampas grass
featherily trying to tell dead factories,
Look here,
something fans, even at the far edge of Europe
where large gulls crowd and abruptly dip, although
the fish have all gone home to bed.
... (read more)