From Poetry and Poetics Centre

---

Scent, Comb, Spoon

Even the might-have-been returns.
The simplest thing – scent, comb, spoon –
and it sweeps back streaming bright dust toward the sun,
an abandoned chaos that needs to be known,
an insistence thirsty for history, hungry for soul.
He writes the idea down,

recalling how they watched two otters once –
that sinuous skein more fluid than water itself.
Do thought and feeling twine like that,
a spiral helix speeding time?
Now the water has stilled to calm
reflection and disappearance keep faith.

But where does it go to, really, he wonders,
or come back from?
Is this what resurrection means,
a flicker of cells, a taste for symmetry?
Drop a dimension, and what was it all about?
His irony’s nervous tic is a grey shortcut:

two hesitations er er
in a declaration of love,
the question-answer in a mock debate,
or less, the single apostrophes either end
of an anecdote with a lame punchline –
‘two dark wings that could not lift our bird to flight’.

And the joint citation for commonsense,
was it conscience, confusion, or cowardice?
Music vanishes into itself, he writes,
Words swim back through words, things of that sort.
He’s reading a book on Scythia bought for a song.
They say she’s taken up golf.

What’s left? A taste for blue.
And a keepsake to outlast them both –
the mid-month moon lugging its unseen half
like cherished flesh. There is a wholeness
to almost everything.

Jan Owen

---

Farewell

With an ostentatious disregard for usual practices,
We took you home and settled you into the kitchen.
The tactless faux-hardwood poly-satin lined coffin
Winded us with its total assault on good taste.

Cooking bacon and eggs we played at normality and
Your uncharacteristic silence made cowards of us
Twitching now and then in the periphery you threatened,
Like Frankenstein, to jolt back into being.

Unnerved by imaginings and wild late winter winds
We took to sentry guard two at a time to keep watch
Our Poe-like paranoia quietly adding terrors to the night
In which a raven would have been no oddity.

Time-suspended, we rode for days through the strangest
Of landscapes where little moved and less breathed
Surrounded by unmoving water, stone and stillness
We learned how hard it is to spend time with the dead.

The half-hearted roasts were devoured in obdurate silence
In defiance of your uncompromisingly writ large state;
We ate to say, “I am alive and this, this thing here - is not I”
You became our kitchen pharaoh, ruling us even now.

On the last night we grew reckless and loud-mouthed
Like pagans fuelled by too much grog and gnawing fear
Stories shot from our raucous and loosened mouths
And as one eye cried – the other roared with laughter.

It was a fine sending off but after the burial when we returned
To the emptied house, exhausted by speeches, tears and the
Grasping arms of loving strangers, we were sated and collapsed
Gratefully weeping on the narrow survivors couch.

Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy

---

the crows

the proper term for a crowd of crows
 is murder                       the blackest of deaths

       tatty reapers with great hacking coughs splitting

the air thick & tasting of
       fingerprints    salt
       in the earth    in a vase
 	             whose flowers have long since been spread over the estate

*

 having spent all our money we prepare for death
 checking each of our pieces for wear & clucking
 hoarse                rattling
 our voices          the spare keys

 take me driving
 i want to hear this rusty shell
      split              like a new egg        which does not 
      crack	                                         but instead
      tear                                            

                                                         divides smoothly
                          flimsy filmy skin   	     
                          interrupted by bone 

	               its center      pale &
                               still               no chirping of life

*

      & the crows come in to land 
      from surrounding cities 

	        a massacre

Sarah K Bell

---

Postcards from the Coast

1 Winter Beach, Morning

A crescent moon,
the beach and tea-trees
are bleakest at dawn

with crows picking at weed
and sea-wrack on the steely sand.

Above the thrum
of returning boats
voices toss on the spume

first boardriders of winter
slice through the water

and beyond the sandbar the sun,
squeezed up from the horizon,
is cut loose
and stains the sea in blood.

2 Estuary at Low Tide

At low tide the wind’s finger
crinkles the gulls
volplaning over the estuary –

on the edge of the curving shoreline
three fishermen
stand as still as boulders

a lone jogger’s shirt
is a tiny stab or red
in the cool opalescence of air.

3 Afternoon, Beneath a Sun-Tight Sky

Startled,
a flurry of terns
unstitches the hem,
trails silver threads
from the estuary’s
fine lace-edge.

*

Tattooed in shade
of marram grasses,
a white-faced heron
stands in frozen silence.

*

Darting minnows,
a fistful of pebbles,
stipple the shallows.

*

Along the shore
shadows of the pines
are a thick black calligraphy.

*

Overhead,
a necklace of gulls
rattles the empty bowl of sky.

4 Moon Over the Estuary

After the dusk’s slow
inhalation of light

the reticent moon appears
from behind the trees.

Soundlessly, she climbs
the blank staircase of sky

her sequined gown trailing
over the black skin of the estuary.

See how she moves
like mercury through the water

the stars her unstringed pearls
spilling on the floor of the world.

	***

Mark Miller

---

Captain Foster Fyans

(This poem is based on the account of Captain Fyans given in Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, 1987).

I picked you out, among these local worthies,

grave sirs, as respectable

as mutton-chop whiskers can make them, framed

in municipal oak.

You have a bold, bland stare in a face like a brick

good, plain, commonsense

brick, sir, and I call a ruffian a ruffian.

By God, we had some sport

with them, the cats unravelling for the work

(and the floggers not much better,

complaining of the heat and wanting beer)

and still the villains

faced it out in silence. Stone men, they called themselves.

Stone men! Well I

can make stones sing, I can make stones long for death,

and yet refuse it.

Out here, the titled ones, colonels and such

fall by the wayside soon enough.

Good plain honest soldiers rule the roost

and a man can rise,

as I have, as you see. Magistrate, city founder

owner of acres

and a stately residence, that gives a man respect,

gives him a lasting name.

*

Hard to believe, in our touchy-feely age,

it didn’t do some damage

that you didn’t wake, perhaps in winter nights

when frost was delivering

the trees from pleasant muffling, that you didn’t think

how, showing off, you used

the metaphor of frost for what the cat-

o’-nine-tails did to flesh,

how you drew out the metaphor, from frost the first stroke,

snow the next and then the third

why then the blood flows freely. How you proposed

to flog a fellow for you

so you may observe. Hard to believe you didn’t

sometimes turn, dressing, and look

over your shoulder at the solid flesh sitting

easy on the bones. Then stretch out

both your arms and hold the mirror giving back

yourself, the magistrate

framed in mahogany. Ordered sounds of the house,

outside, as far as the river

your peaceful lawns, still faintly traced with frost.

Joan Kerr