Poems
for Yumna Kassab
As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
springs over and we say ‘sky’
Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.
A motorboat’s propellor chops like a machete across the tide
sending a swift, breaking wave to the shore. I walk slowly
over rocks that are scored, overhung by a low, acned cliff.
In one of the rockpools an octopus stretches away
What lasts as well as this illustration of the ark
kept over since childhood? The closed cabin,
that dark indoors, huge and somehow private,
like all homes of love. The shake of the storm
To land within a corona of jonquil, portal
to retrospect, with the immanence of insect. A thorax
hottens, sensational, in its own yellow canopy.
Being, flown via surprise winter (at rest, in instinct)
Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR’s 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
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The first morning on waking
I thought it was fog, or mist, I thought it had rained,
but the ground was dry.
82 Sentences, Each Taken from the ‘Last Statement’ of a Person Executed by the State of Texas Since 1984
It’s the night after Christmas
and I’m sitting out on the balcony
watching a huge full moon
and listening to the barking
of a half-dozen dogs
and calls of five different
frogs in the vegetable garden,
