Australian Poetry
The Collected Verse Of Mary Gilmore: Volume 1 1887–1929 edited by Jennifer Strauss
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.
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Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem
asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,
kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:
or like a kouros, hauled with pain
from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,
its maker long put out to sea:
or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved
before Traherne, a child bereft,
and set him claiming Paradise again:
yes, it’s here for the restless heart –
The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all
may now be well at last.
... (read more)Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –
no fear of darkness in the singing wood.
Hear the threnody written on the wind:
a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow
path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:
... (read more)The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine
In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.
... (read more)The Past Completes Me: Selected poems 1973–2003 by Alan Gould
for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’
Douglas Dunn
To the sea we bear our fathers in state –
or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.
Surf mild as receding tides,
we slump in dunes with our burdens,
... (read more)A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a splay of emerald, turquoise, black and yellow feathers – was too dazed to bite, and clearly had a broken wing. Though we’ve always called these beautiful birds 28s, technically they are a ring-necked parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln variety of ring-necked. The demarcation lines between varieties are hazy. The local ‘nickname’ matters as local names do. We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. My daughter doesn’t know it died. She said it was the closest she’d ever come to something so ‘amazing’. I left it at that.
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