Australian
Poetry Collaboration
#38
GONE BUSH
Whether running from or rushing towards,
temporary or long-term immersion…
there is change.
Archived in Pandora
preserving Australia’s leading
online cultural sites
from Meuse Press –
https://meusepress.tripod.com/Meuse.htm
LATEST MEUSE
ANTHOLOGY
FEATURING: Jude Aquilina, Louis Armand, Anne M Carson, Robbie Coburn,
Lisa
Collyer, Beatriz Copello, Anna Couani, Barbara De Franceschi, Joe Dolce,
David Gilbey, Pip Griffin, Susan Hawthorne, Dominique Hecq, Richard Hillman,
Kit Kelen, S.K. Kelen, Myra King, Roland Leach, Harold Legaspi, Mark Liston,
Kate Lumley, Teena McCarthy, Marie McMillan, Suzi Mezei, Jan Napier,
Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Anita Nahal, Norm Neill, Ron Riddell,
Ellen Shelley, Rose van Son, Beth Spencer,
Danielle Welborn, Rodney Williams,
Paul Williamson & Warrick Wynne
Louis Armand
DI/ODE DXXXIV
gone bush out of transpacific viral con
flagration of vanities / back when
poetry was a mobile fallout shelter.
dig far enough y'd reach China.
a whole nation lullaby'd into exception
ism / who'd bomb us? red centre
w/ crosshairs painted on it, not in yr
wildest dreams, sport. though bull-
dust knows which way the wind / but
as to gravity? a species hedging its bets
wld still be dangling from trees,
they sd. play it enough rope &
it might even make it to Mars & back.
Louis Armand's latest collection is INFANTILISMS (Puncher&Wattmann, 2024). www.louis-armand.com
¯
Anita Nahal
From drenched thoughts (Authorspressbooks, Delhi, 2023)
Go Priya go
Run fast run
Take your son and go
To a place far away and then some
Can’t be the moon or the once non-gratis-poor planet Pluto
It’s far out, like elusive glistening dew drops on each toe
But maybe across the oceans
From where at least once they’d settled their emotions
They could fly back to see her dad
Come for a short while, not disturbing anyone
Foreign or homespun
A forced balanced cocktail Priya made, both joyful and sad
Most folks want a normalcy may come from their journeys
In that effort they keep writing new, rehashed, or retold stories.
We cook, we work, we clean
We love, we sex, we sleep
We hate, latter a word Priya likes to keep unseen
Why show our mean struggles to others, just be desirous to reap
From all that’s good and gone by
Like some decisions, some choices, some fleeting magical high
Flybys, or times that’ll never come back
Like many, many milestones, some moved, some stuck
Missed births, funerals, and weddings
The natural or adopted
Or situations to which one adapted
Don’t you think it’s all semantics?
With some feelings thrown into the mix
Will AI be unique or offer a different fix?
Her life she thought was going by
Going, going, gone
No need to stay or pry
Going, going, gone like in Bob Dylan’s song.
She: “No need for me to pry too much into my own thoughts
Might be there are too many droughts
Oh, don’t you feel sorry for me
For I’ll always have gusto and oomph in me
Will not vegetate feeling lonely
What lonely, lonely, lonely?!
Got my dear ones And near ones
Everything is my son, friends, family
Those who sit heavy in velvet-tapestry-kind-a sofas of the past
Might not see many crying in their funeral flower-less repast.”
As she aged, alchemists tugged at her sleeve often
And gypsies gestured to her
Come join us in your years of autumn
With graying hair at her temples like nascent silver fir
Salting-peppering more and more all over
Which is normal, not rare
The aging
Hopefully maturing
Her desires and wants
Her restless travels
Her few and far remaining needs
Now quietly bestriding the times and taunts
Time had not changed
Only the “times” had changed.
Anita Nahal, Ph.D., is a professor, poet, novelist, & children's book writer. Twice Pushcart Prize-nominated (22, 23) and finalist, Tagore Literary Prize, 2023, Anita won the Nissim Prize for Excellence in Literature, 2024. Her third poetry collection, What’s wrong with us Kali women?, is mandatory reading at Utrecht University. www.anitanahal.com
¯
Jan Napier
Last Place, Next Place
In blue sky towns I sizzle donuts, work the darts,
spruik dodgems: go right ‘round the outside of the track
for a longer, smoother ride. No cubicle, no computer,
just red dust, loudspeakers, Jack giving a thumbs up.
About to bed down beside a thousand mile highway,
I walk away from the fire, away from crew yawning
and yarning: last place, next place, watching the dark
at my feet, gravel a treachery, that last tinny complicit.
Ambling along the line of semis and vans, I smile.
Someone will check that I’m not coming back, then
the boys’ll share their who got lucky stories, jokes
rough as hessian water bags hanging from bull bars.
Pausing in my doorway I look up through blue black
fathoms to stars hung in bright silences, the milky way
diamond dust flung by an unknown hand, and I am
soft and small, crawling the bed of an ancient sea.
Gazing into that cloudy light, I find myself unshelled.
Out here, away from the knives behind the city’s
neon beat, I can almost believe. Then the genny
thud thuds to a halt and the darkness floods back.
Jan Napier is a Western Australian writer. Her work has been showcased in journals and anthologies within Australia and overseas. Jan’s poem My Neighbour at Sixty Nine was included in the May 2024 issue of Live Encounters.
¯
Norm Neill
mate
G’day, remember me?
We met last week
in Wollongong
or maybe in that pub
in Coonabarabran
a coupl’a months ago,
although it might’a been in Bourke,
but I know we sank a few.
And if I remember right,
at closing time
you still owed me a beer.
Norm Neill has been a timber-feller, fence-post splitter, shop assistant, money counter, tractor driver, factory worker, taxi driver, psychiatric nurse, door-to-door salesperson, part-time student, full-time student, teacher, historian and museum guide. His poetry has appeared in journals, anthologies and the Sun-Herald newspaper. He has convened a poetry workshop since 2002.
Ellen Shelley
A Stretch of Time
It came in through the trees—
a migration of backyards to beaten tracks,
stemmed light shimmering in the clipped bark of morning,
a dog wagging on his deck of nails.
How precise this randomness
where distance enters a fraction at a time.
I walk by lip syncing to the music,
my mouth a tunnel of tunes,
the path behind
loud with fumes
and fresheners dangle
from a dash of mirrors.
Out over the creek
bats hang like prayer flags
out of wind.
Cracks are a type of regeneration
here in the trodden-in; an understudy of grass
rehearses for the flat-leaf-spin.
Weather is a transition,
a harvest of fragment and scent
binding us to what we couldn’t leave behind.
Battery low, music replaced by birdsong,
a wave of dust loaded in springs hind legs.
My bra strap digs another layer of flesh,
feet drag up the rear. This lag and snap
beneath cotton and skin, whisks away the sweat,
absorbing what I hear.
Ellen Shelley's journey as a poet began at an early age, when she discovered the power of words to heal and transform. Ellen uses language to align the uncertainties of daily life, her words find strength from wherever she calls home at the time. Her debut poetry collection is titled
Out of the Blocks (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).
¯
Lisa Collyer
A Field Guide to Survival
Bushwhack into the wild filtering out
the barrelling rigs due-east of the fire-track.
Follow Linnaeus and binomially key-in
Latin or Greek−this taxon or that.
Collect the fittest, mimic a resolve to disperse.
Naturalise marsupium to stow viable offspring
and replenish the seed bank. Smoke some fruit
scarify in-between sandpaper and thumb
to wear thin, thick skin. Pose winnowing pastorals
on a gallery wall and incubate on ice to keep.
Lisa Collyer is the author of the poetry collection, How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, (short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award) and published with Gazebo Books/Life Before Man. Her personal essay, Prolonged Exposure is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage with Fremantle Press.
¯
Beth Spencer
Wild things (a serenade)
I would like to sing a song
to the loose, the wandering
and the unattached.
To those who cannot
grow themselves in rows
for the benefit of others.
I sing to the ones whose
invisible roots disappear down deep
into the earth to bring up treasure.
To the untamed
and the disarrayed.
Striding forth
in the wake of the bulldozer
— first after the fire
— bedding themselves
into clay and shaking it.
I salute even those
that in the presence of
crimes
ignorance
neglect
greed
become thugs (a mirror).
The ones saying:
‘Too much here in too few hands!
Too indiscriminate, poisonous!
And I will take it back
and take it over and create a tide
of seed that covers everything
and entangles generations.’
I honor that small wisp
that separates you
from fruit and flowers,
and the crack in me
that holds you dormant
until ready or not.
A version of this poem was previously published in Vagabondage (UWAP).
Beth Spencer’s books include The Age of Fibs, Vagabondage, and How to Conceive of a Girl. Her poems, essays, memoir and fiction have been published widely and broadcast on ABC Radio National. She writes on Darkinjung land on the NSW Central Coast, and at www.bethspencer.com and https://bethspen.substack.com/.
¯
Rodney Williams
Sighting goannas across East Gippsland
with respect for the Gunaikurnai people
I.
graphite-grey with dotted scales
skin merging into leaves & bark
under shade still hot in summer
or plainly seen on stone & sand
glinting in sharper sunlight
this largest of local lizards
raises its nostrils to sniff,
swishing its tail just once
as a show of resolution,
before shambling off
through roughest heathland,
looking in the pink of health
· Stirling Street, Marlo
II.
driving over the Dooyeedang
you park to check out signage
for the Bataluk Cultural Trail
one of several stopping points
on a path shaped like a lizard
from mountains down to lakes
its graphic emblem a goanna
this traditional trail ages old
the message here unmistakable
in listing places of significance
cataloguing levels of losses
with pause for thought extended
· Princes Highway, Stratford
III.
by the roadside west of Bairnsdale
to the left, heading for Melbourne
on one of many cockatoo eucalypts
you spot this carving of a goanna
cut deep in timber larger than life
by the blade of a First Nations artist –
finding accommodation off the highway
you dine with a couple from Amsterdam
in awe of spotting a reptile so big
in a century-old heritage pear tree
planted by settlers ploughing up yams
to sell potatoes from a wheelbarrow
· Waterholes Guest House, Archies Road
IV.
with a quiet scuttling sound
down this leafiest driveway
that same goanna drops in again
making a point of visiting daily
perhaps pushed back to this yard
out on the edge of the village
by controlled burns in nearby bush
maybe reducing food supplies...
first found raiding a blackbird’s nest
next seen metres up a lilly pilly
now on that track back to state forest
swooped by a squadron squawking
Stirling Street, Marlo
Rodney Williams edits Catchment - Poetry of Place (within the Baw Baw Arts Alliance website), on Gunaikurnai country, in Gippsland, Victoria. He explores both Western and Japanese verse forms. Presenting work live and on radio, Rodney has had poems published widely, here and overseas, with various books released through Ginninderra Press.
¯
Beatriz Copello
PRAYER ROOM
in my temple I lie on a bed of dead moist leaves
like Corinthian columns gum trees adorn my sanctuary
my fantasies are fanned by branches which like ballerinas
move graciously as the wind tells me stories of an ancient past
no sermons or eulogies, no chanting or prayers no homilies
just cicadas singing they tell me that tomorrow will be another hot day.
no tapestries hang from marble walls, just bark with intricate patterns
made with shades of greys browns black and beige creating a canvass
where the imagination sees nature’s hand at art
bush rocks are my sculptures and bull ants penitents
dreaming dreams of freedom and peace I pray in my refuge
above the sky dresses the forest with a velvet blue cape
I meet my creator in the crevices of fallen trunks
in the eucalyptus mist in the song of the bell bird
in the shimmering of silver leaves
flowering grevilleas make a humble offering to the native bees
while hurried lizards pass me by
the dry earth blesses me
I breathe solitude
Beatriz Copello is an award-winning poet, her books are: Women Souls and Shadows, Meditations at the Edge of a Dream, Under the Gums Long Shade, Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria, A Call to the Stars, Witches Women and Words, No Salami Fairy Bread, Rambles, The Book of Jeremiah, Renacer en Azul and Lo Irrevocable del Halcon.
¯
Anna Couani
Wilderness
wilderness
a map full of inlets
dark as film noir
twinkling lights
the whispering quiet
under the stars
derelict house
out of focus doorways
where things crumble
we ache for leaves
the still glassy water
this wilderness
it explodes
under the radar
riffing on words
precious jewels
words on white paper
lost in the clouds
Prev appeared Kalliope X
The line “dark as film noir” is a borrowed line by Robert Verdon from his book Spiral Life.
Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe. Published seven books of prose and poetry. The most recent is local (Flying Islands). Her out-of-print work: annacouani.com. Wilderness is also set to music at https://annacouani1.bandcamp.com.
¯
Myra King
Morning
you take a blue-gum leaf
from its
companions identical
a balance
with its centred
heart a tremble
of quicksilver dew
in the trust of
your open hand
you carry it
gentle
to the lucid billabong
you make
a wish
then on the face of it
lay down the impossible
water afloat upon water
Myra King lives on Worlds End Highway in South Australia. A Pushcart nominee, with firsts in Global Poetry UK and Ballarat's Pure Poetry Masterclass, her poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines and published by Meuse Press, Puncher & Wattmann, Melbourne Poets Union, and Ginninderra Press.
¯
Harold Legaspi
Blackness
The long-necked heron could see
over the hill, into the neighbouring swamp, wet
branches of cypress trees and Spanish moss.
Rain and seasonal flooding causing water levels
to fluctuate—vegetation growing moist, duckweed
covering the water’s surface. Shrubs and bushes grow
beneath the trees, and knobs poke metres above water.
They are outgrowths of the trees’ root systems; thickets
of roots accumulating soil. What news does the swamp bring
of our world to the heavens, to the gods? It’s no good.
More heartache among the fertile lakes and streams,
more wildlife like alligators and panthers calling it home.
Rain comes and the heron stands long-legged & still,
underneath a trickle from the clouds, watching closely.
There’s plenty of food and little protection. The swamp is a
sponge, absorbing excess water. Its sinister silks are forbidding.
Cloudy sunsets threaten its privacy, bracing itself for blackness,
bracing itself for the night.
Harold Legaspi is an Australian writer and artist born in Manila, Philippines, and living in unceded Darug Nura (Western Sydney). Some of Harold’s books include Letters in Language (Flying Islands), Song Sonnets: Little Songs and Bahay Kubo: Children’s Literature (Papel Publishing). His latest book is Dios Ko.
¯
Richard Hillman
The Stifling
This is the burden’s country: all shoulders
gumnut kookaburra koala in eucalyptic decay
watching these chained trees bark-stripped
hushed as they are hauled away, into a sombre dying Light
haunted sunset back-drooping beneath the stifling
Vertical: the heat plays tricks, steam rises from the billy
smoke spirals above Paradise like birds of prey
something predatory shimmers in the soaring, stifling
I’ve had enough of this shit, constantly reminded
to watch every explorative step as if creativity were a crime
and that stifling nuisance, Light, tugging at my shoulder
for an attentiveness I cannot give, too busy wiping
the sliding scale of sweat from my searching eyes
We sit around sipping, drinking from our stack of slabs
(though there are more empty cartons than full)
newcomers bruised from their bush-knowledge
staying out of the women’s business but sometimes
the heat stifles conversation; the need, the urge, and holding
to nothing but a violence of will, to have what was never yours
The cops have just rolled up wanting to know who lit the fire
“they went that way, cobber”
Diagonal: this is the start, a stepping out of sorts, a shuffling gait
the colonial rhythm of abuse, the scraping, vituperative sounds
of clanging doors, though
we wait in the carpark of culture, your visit an Eternity
the children hanging their heads from the shame of car windows
and the stifling
Do the words end here; what a stretch to need a Voice
as if no one can hear the collective groan, the oppressive
gathering of restless humanity, the muralised buzz of mosquitos
creating a brand-new skin tone, tattooed and inked
in a swatting discourse of dissent, demonstrating that resistance
is fated to repeat the way of Bushido, the warrior dancing
on the Outback bar, as settlement settles into the new delusion
of survival: continuance as fantasy as burden as stifling
Richard Hillman lives and writes in Gumbaynggirr Country, on New South Wales far north coast. He was editor of Sidewalk: An Antipodean Journal of Poetry and Poetics (1998-2002). He has published his poetry widely on four continents over five decades. His most recent collection is Raw Nerve (Puncher & Wattmann).
¯
Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
The cows arrive
In light rain,
there are droplets in the curled hair
on their spines and heads.
The cow in the crush is big,
her body heat steams,
she’s soft and hot to touch.
All around in the winter damp,
bracken-coloured paddocks
to her blackness.
Her calf is railed off and she wants it
but the crush’s head-lock is failing
so we say har, csh-csh, geddup,
you applying your whole force,
holding her head as she bucks entrapment,
to save her from harm.
Under flat winter skies
over frost-bitten paddocks,
we are one heated cluster,
voicing animals up from yard
through run to crush,
sliding rails, opening gates,
holding black wet nostrils,
twisting cow tails,
releasing them back to herd.
Never before so close:
each eyelash, grey tongue, ear tag
and, with bull calves just-marked,
feeling down scrotum,
counting testes below ring
as firm as wooden spoons in sacs.
I stop fussing with pumps, tubes and bags,
watch them walk into our high blond grass,
elegant herd of companionship and defence,
their individual characters: the loner, the kicker, the dancer.
They will mate, gestate and birth
barely-aided by us:
it makes me feel tender
about their new half-moon imprints,
the silky-soft skin at their tail root.
Anna Kerdijk Nicholson is an Australian/English poet and author of three books, 'The Bundanon Cantos', 'Possession' and 'Everyday Epic'. 'Possession' won the Victorian Premier’s Prize, the Wesley Michel Wight Prize and was shortlisted for two others. Anna has also won awards for individual poems. She farms in rural NSW.
Teena McCarthy
The Gateway #3
Travelling down
Dusty road at night
In the middle of the road
2 giant Black Dogs come together
2 giant Black dogs then part to let us thru
2 giant black dogs come together again
They seemed to be waiting for something.. someone?
We were frightened
We asked old Tjulpi’s advice
‘Don’t worry for you
That Dingo spirits
They let you thru
They are the Lore keepers
The gateway
They’ll leave u alone
Theyre waiting for theyre man
That wrong way one
That broke the lore
For the dogs know this
They need to settle the score
That rubbish man, be no more
They are gonna git him-finished!
Those gates won’t open
For now, this road is shut.
Those Dog spirits then disappeared
Into thin air
Rite in-front of our eyes
Then they just took off
Like ghosts in disguise….
¯
Paul Williamson
The forest is growing back.
Five years after Black summer bushfires
eucalypts with black trim
stand with foliage almost normal
next to black and white skeletons
the same height. Between them half grown
saplings sport orange new leaves
near wattle, bottle brush and she oak.
No wildlife is seen.
Record temperatures have become routine
while the forest waits to burn again.
Paul Williamson lives in Canberra. He has published poems on a range of topics in Australia, NZ, the US, UK, Canada and Japan. His collections include A Hint of Eden, Along the Forest Corridor, and Edge of Southern Bright, published by Ginninderra Press. His background is in Earth Sciences.
¯
David Gilbey
Letters to Clancy
Almost off-piste in these American-owned
snowfields at Falls Creek,
felled by my nemesis Shadow
Valley on the early morning ice:
broke three ribs but, unknowing, kept skiing
gingerly for the next day and a half.
You’ll be right by Christmas, said Sam.
Sneezing excruciated me; turning in bed
racked my lungs. Today I fall again but softly,
ski-tips failing to twist, iamb …
Outside the Wagga Lodge the Summit Chair
snakes its gaudy cargo up to the windswept ridge
before it splits, lego-like, to carve
sonnets down the gleaming Village run.
I suspect the poet’s dozen is fourteen but
belief is a shrouded word, stretching me,
breathing heavily, pausing at mossy rocks and thatch
past aged kanji inscriptions on stone memorials,
wooden slats and laminated public notices,
all the thousand steps up Yamadera and its eight
hundred-year Buddhist flame. Luckily
my body muscles my mind’s scepticism and
my heart, lifting its twenty-one year new
mitral valve, pumps my legs to almost skip
at next year’s seventy-seven: kiju – high fortune
more metaphorical than local 77 Bank
and one more trombone than the famed seventy-six
leading the hit parade. Up here poetry
is the sound of cicadas from the silence
of the rocks, wrote Basho,
agnostic about the OED.
At Futaba, this year’s Japan Writers Conference,
there is little bush and most of the ancient life
has been bulldozed, scraped and stored
as contaminated nuclear waste,
in plastic, after the tsunami broke
the seawall and fucked more than just
the Daichi power station. Its still poisonous
skeletal remains we see on the horizon,
from the roof of the modernist museum.
The business centre’s pristine rooms
frame, in steel and glass, our Facebook pics,
our reeling and writhing as we edit drafts
and create, almost spontaneously,
deft, short poems. Banzai!
Reboot the dark tourism of Route 6!
The rain is a sceptical mirror
disbelieving photography.
So, you’re airport-bound for ten hours?
First world problem – a poet’s licence.
Just think of it as a lime-tree bower
whence you can watch your friends and the world
go by. I saw your poetry extravaganza at Cobargo
online: writers whirling words
as fistfuls of poems take in the world and,
like conjurors prestidigitating, open
to reveal sestina doves, crow sonnets,
galah ghazals ... At that very time
I was travelling to a different south,
driving the Great River Road along
the Murray, past Jinjellic and Walwa
to Towong, where my sculptor friend
John Wood, an alchemist magician,
has reincarnated the ancient gods
from beaten and twisted steel,
as two-metre brolgas swooping
and stretching in huge ordovician
metasediments anchored
to the wetlands.
David Gilbey is currently President of Booranga Writers’ Centre and has edited fourW: new writing from1990-2023. His most recent poetry collections is Pachinko Sunset (Five Islands Press, 2016). He lectured in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, and Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University, Sendai, Japan. He has become a casual high school teacher.
¯
Dominique Hecq
Unwound
Night of furphies. Possums hiss like cats. We tear from the brutalities of language, machines, protocols, corollaries, sorority, synchronicity. Flee human letters and litters, their heady smells, flotsam and jetsam. I feel not terror but elation. Writhe in my skin. Revert to my wolf instincts. Howl at the giant moth ball masquerading as moon. Unlike Ginsberg, I have no teeth. I feed on dust. My saturnian eyes defy geography. I pound the ground, dog in tow. We’re off the beaten track. Prowl the parched wetlands by the obsidian necklace once creek. I give my dog silence biscuits so he doesn’t starve. The trees people their bare bones with leathery flesh. They yawn as the morning star peeps through the clouds’ curls. Bow their heads to distant thunder. Hum a wordless tune under their breath. Let them remake language without us.
The dark quenches our thirst for unbridled companionship. Trees blaze, thrumming around. Hair spiky as an echidna’s ancient coat spread all over my body, unsettling all idea of time and place. We reach the lake/ water hole together. A ripple of nausea surges into my/ her body. I/ she shakes. Pronouns drop to their knees. Dog, come back, they rasp. And throw up.
Familiar smell of bat shit on the breeze. I close my eyes on the waning moon. Come, boy, come, I open my arms wide. The caked mud crackles under my feet. Dog materialises at my side. Says we must talk about sticks.
The air’s so muggy its clings. The dog runs his ribbon tongue on my calves. Let’s go, he says. I’m rooted to the ground.
Leaving. Setting sail for the unknown. We've been in leaving mode since we disembarked in this dead-end world. Leaving without a tour operator. No craze for nomadism which, in its current forms, is nothing more than sedentarism in motion. None of this gallivanting that extends its networks of freewheeling sightings and vacuities of escapades across continents and seas.
Leaving is something else entirely. It's jumping in/ out, exiling yourself. Exsul mentis domusque. Deprived of reason and its home. Where the prose poem begins.
Dominique Hecq is a widely anthologised and award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. She lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Hecq writes in English and French. Her creative works comprise a novel, six collections of short stories and seventeen books of poetry. Otopos is her latest publication.
¯
Warrick Wynne
walking beside the franklin
how light from that wild water lit the path beside us
how a thousand stumbling stones rattled in the rapids
how we walked a path redolent with sound
bathed in the flickering light that fuelled us
between the line of the river
and the darkness of the forest
between the heat-green
and the ice rocks
we walked beside the rushing water
and stones big and round as loaves
we walked beside a strip of light
and our faces were illuminated
we walked a wavering line by the edge
of a great river, oblivious, heading west
Warrick Wynne lives on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, Australia. He has three published poetry collections and his work has been featured in a wide range of magazines and journals. His poetry page is at warrickwynnepoetry.com
¯
Jude Aquilina
Inland Sea
for Charles Sturt
The ghost of the inland sea
still swells and broils
wind waves sculpture dunes
rippling corrugated tracks
where sand sets hard
on the ancient sea floor.
The hull of our four-wheel-drive
cruises the channel country
pitching and rocking
as we accelerate over crests
then scud down slip faces
our tyre-tracks soon washed away
by a ceaseless tide of wind.
Sometimes a howling tsunami
churns the surface, swamps the land
red grit seeps into pores and crevices
drowns towns and invades homes.
When the wall of spuming dust
recedes, we creatures crawl out
red-eyed, to a patch of dead beach.
Heat keeps the faint-hearted
safely docked in city streets
while we foolhardy mariners
stock our cabins with supplies
and sail through the empty centre.
Some sink, break down or lose their way.
Never leave your vessel, they say
but thirst and fear send them overboard
to float alone, thirsty, blistered.
Their footprints vanish, until all that’s left
is a bone pile, bleached white as shell
that some nomad may or may not discover
like the ribs of a sunken ship.
Jude Aquilina's poetry is published across Australia and abroad. She has published several poetry collections and won numerous awards. Jude works as a teacher of creative writing and has taught at universities, TAFE, schools and a prison. Jude is a member of International PEN and Asia Pacific Writers and Translators.
¯
Roland Leach
Rabbit Trapper
Here we are, Pete and I, sitting on the side
of the road, two surfboards, and a kelpie
named Sammy, heading home, late 70s,
from a surf town called Byron Bay, few
know about. Coming back through the centre,
and somewhere before Broken Hill, an old truck
stopped and we got in, boards in the back,
us in the front. ‘Good to see young fellas
this far out?’ He told us he was one
of the last rabbit trappers. ‘Sold the skins
to make a livin’, he boasted, but most
remarkable was his one arm –
lost it in the war he casually said
as if he had carelessly mislaid it –
and driving a manual vehicle, where his right
arm had to cross his body every time
he changed gears. I asked ‘snares?’ but he coughed,
winced, shook his head, ‘traps, steel-jaw traps’.
I almost told him that I knew a poem
about a rabbit catcher, early sylvia plath,
but knew it would show us interlopers,
a generation or two too late, in this dry bush country.
¯
Marie McMillan
To the Wonderland of the Underland
No time to say hello, goodbye or I’ll be late.
I want a pink-eyed white rabbit to take me
down, down
a hole, a burrow,
to guide me through the subterranean,
to search for that which,
like the lost city of Atlantis,
is out of sight and, mostly, out of mind.
I want to dig and excavate with him
burial places of ancient peoples,
of a Mungo Man, a Mungo Woman,
of the colonial settlers,
of things ossified and fossilised,
of roots and radicles,
artichokes and radishes
implanted in the deep of the obsidian
subsoil.
I want to explore the sous-sol,
to drink and splash in its wells and aquifers,
its lakes, its caves, its micro-caverns,
to play marbles with hard,
colourless or colourful upalas,
to play hide and seek with the aerating
slugs and worms, insects and spiders,
woodlice and crustaceans,
stygofauna and troglofaunal,
multitudinous under and other things …
Trojan tillers and toilers of the alluvium.
Tick tock, tick tock …
The white rabbit reminds me
“Don’t be late, don’t be late,”
for we custodians must
guard and protect the very sods of
our secret country,
Our Wonderland of the Underland,
with its nourishing layers and strata,
replenishing and fertilising
this inverted heaven in earth,
before those merciless clods of
predatory magnates soil
irrevocably
the priceless Nibelungen nugget
of our ecosystem.
Tick tock, tick tock … our clocks are ticking.
No time to say hello, goodbye, but
“Don’t be late, don’t be late.”
- - -
With thanks to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s White Rabbit and with sincere respect to our First Nations’ People.
Marie McMillan A finalist in New South Wales Poetry and Bankstown Poetry Slams, she’s a “wanna be” poet. Some of her poems and short stories have won minor awards or been anthologised. Her crime fiction novel “The Lost Day – Under Newgrange” about spousal drink-spiking and rape was published in 2021.
¯
Pip Griffin
Feral horses
Setting up our solitary tent
after the tyre-scorching drive
into the national park
we see feral horses far below
cavorting in the gorge
bodies ghostly in near dark
next morning we’re breathing
hot air acrid with smoke
heat encircling us
a eucalyptus-scented crucible
you say I’m going to the river –
d’you want to come?
we half-walk half-slide
scratched by scrub
slapping at March flies black as bats
must be fifty degrees! I say
we’re crazy – should go back
you gaze down granite-mute
after thirty minutes stumbling
we reach the river bank
thick with blackberry lantana dung
three horses skulk behind she-oaks
snicker with derision as we strip off
gasp in numbing water
emerge shivering dress quickly
for the climb back
you wheeze and pant
stop every five minutes
to guzzle from your water bottle
twenty years since my last smoke
lung capacity’s still crap
(how would they get you out?)
we reach the top
drag our bodies up onto the flat
collapse under sparse shade
of stringy barks
you retch into the bushes
(you made it back this time…)
lung cancer would take you
in a year.
Pip Griffin’s poetry has been published in Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand journals and anthologies. Her verse narrative, Virginia & Katherine: The Secret Diaries (Pohutukawa Press 2021) won the Society of Women Writers NSW Poetry Award 2022. Her latest publication (her eighth) is Opus: a life with music (Ginninderra Press 2023).
Kate Lumley
In the centre, out there
The widowed, or those who’d like to be,
bus into the outback at this time of year,
before heat keeps all but the wisest
away. They want to unlearn loneliness,
to let the balm of sand and winds with
different names for compass points tell them
of the deep calm of nothing. They want to forget
hard necessity, to paint abstract marks on canvas,
to avoid narration with endings, be certain of place.
In sunset by the lake, they write waka after Shikibu,
learn that words can only sketch the slope-of-light,
the water-lily-float, the dragonfly-surface-skate.
Kate Lumley is a Sydney-based writer. Kate’s poetry and prose has been published in various journals, reviews, anthologies and chapbooks including Studio, Not Very Quiet, Rochford Street Review, Australian Love Poems 2013 (Inkerman & Blunt), Prayers of a Secular World (Inkerman & Blunt, 2016); To end all wars (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018).
¯
Mark Liston
Dissipate as Smoke
The falling night grabs cooling air
invites tree canopy and clouds to hang
hooded, to listen for whispers of deepest breath.
In our inner chatter, sorrow can taunt you.
In our softest voices, as if scared to louden
grief is the limbs and leaves rustling above us—
as if waiting for something else to go wrong.
His wheelchair stalls at this our final resting
spot for today. Eyelids of light loop the moon—
that sliver of sleep on the top branch of sky.
As your exhales sneak through gritted teeth
our words dissipate as smoke.
After a long cough I stub your cigarette.
Wheelchairs are legs and arms, and
keep chest, neck and head erect: where mouth
and lungs rescue his every word and breath
Breezes, cool our bared arms, usher us inside.
Our last talk blended truth with kneaded air.
Cicada last rite quietens, our words settle.
Stillness shares itself around.
I drive the wheelchair through the automatic door.
Guido cries as we hoist him into bed.
I feel his whisper and kiss, eyes staring through me.
Mark Liston’s poems appear in numerous publications including Canberra Times, Newcastle Poetry Prize, Australian Poetry Anthology, Meuse, Rochford St Review, Burrow, Brushstroke Anthology 2024, and shortlisted for Hammond House Poetry Prize in UK 2022. Mark is working on a poetry collection: Empathy House Suite, for 2025.
¯
Barbara
De Franceschi
Minute of
Silence
Terracotta haze.
I feel the hint of heat to come.
Autumn’s dampness dissolves,
dusk quietens the sky,
birds cease to chortle,
bleats become faint,
an easterly wind controls its sighs.
Self-vibe is splashed with fragrances of eucalypts
and wild lemon grass.
The stillness contains the paradox of who I am:
half empty – half full.
Ghost gums on a sunset altar
uplift their branches to say
Behold!
For a brief fraction the acute tranquillity blurs reality,
my eyes see flames where there is no grate or fire,
I am weightless, neither captive nor free,
simply being in a spiral of shooting stars.
¯
Anne M Carson
What the picnic taught me
Always dust and heat, sparse
eucalypt shade. Our veteran
brown tartan rug was flung over
sticks and stones on verges or
patches of scrub, confident any-
where could be made home.
Nesting anodised aluminium
travel cups unzipped from their
leather case – faded pinks and
silvers, tan and peach hues. Dad’s
beer, Mum’s shandy, home-made
lemon cordial for us kids. Tea
from the trusty thermos, sugar
from a yellow Bakelite pie-crust
frilled, screw-top jar. Something
sharp always prodded, flies and
mozzies always struck, dust always
insinuated into sandals, between
toes. I did not enjoy the bush, sullen
‘civilised’ child before what was
unfettered. I identified with the
sheep – they hadn’t asked to be
there sweltering either – you could
see they preferred shade, the herd
huddled under what the straggly
stands offered – why couldn’t they
see it, I pleaded in my cocoon
of anguished adolescence, hating
farmers. Years after the final family
picnic, I learnt to love birdsong –
carolling, choralling, filling my ears
with melody, my eyes with eucalypts’
pale khaki grace. Years more to feel
connection – bird, tree, sky; tree,
person, ground, all apiece. Years
again before recognising even those
scraggles of bush, dusty and derelict
had been loved and sung over, over
millennia.
Prev published Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2022
Anne M Carson’s poetry has been awarded and published widely including shortlisting in the Society of Women Authors New South Wales Poetry Prize (2024). Her latest book is The Detective’s Chair: prose poems about fictional detectives (Liquid Amber Press 2023). Her Phd (2023, RMIT) received an Outstanding Dissertation Prize (AERA, 2024).
Ron Riddell
Exhibition Drive Revisited
Rain on the stones, glaze on the clay
leaves still bright with the light of day
we walk on into the gathering dusk
ushered in by gusts of rain
with singular shining intent
as seagulls keen and wheel
on we go, in and out of showers
clouds darkening, hovering
at the end of the track signs gone
leaving steps into the bush undone
yet the steps we’ve taken echo on
in birdsong, leaves, inlets
while beyond the deep blue dusk
clouds begin to rise, clear
and we walk along the higher path
where the light is rose, gold-leafed
and the echoes of the words of friends
are waves still breaking on the shore
Ron Riddell is a writer with a deep commitment to ecology, on all possible levels: natural, social-temporal, philosophic and spiritual. He believes and works in the spirit of the transformative power of poetry and all creative human expression. At present, he divides his time between New Zealand and Colombia.
¯
Susan Hawthorne
wet season
clouds each day line up differently
today at lunch a zippered cloud
slowly closes as I watch
the shining light decreasing
they go a deep grey and as they do
the temperature drops the day cools
rain can be horizontal or misty
at night wind picks up thrashing trees
the beach is wild sand scoured
grey rocks stare at me like sea lions
seaweed sprawls across the sand
commas of brown punctuating it
among the debris a sponge in lilac
the air is seaspray-wet not raining
like walking through a fine mist
two halves of a rainbow sit on the horizon
a big break in the centre someone took a bite
on the beach near the creek calophyllum
is making heavy clusters of seed pods
the glossy oval new leaves positioned
in a spiral are iridescent green
the tide has been high right to the top edge
where the greenery begins sand is hard
and easy to walk upon or roll if you are
a tiny round seed blown by the wind
the white apple tree is fruiting
any day now we can expect
to see a wandering cassowary
Susan Hawthorne is a poet, novelist and publisher who lives and works on Djiru Country. Her recent books include the novel, Dark Matters, and the poetry collection, The Sacking of the Muses. Her book, Cow, was shortlisted for the Audre Lorde Poetry Prize and the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize.
¯
Excursion
The past emanates from recollection’s
undergrowth;
the reek of rain-specked detritus
on the forest floor,
the human contents of the school bus
unbound in meandering sepia-damp,
the downy emerald lush
of biophytes on felled trunks
where backpacks sat demure
in anticipation of their owner’s
return, the sun shy
behind a canopy suffused with life
and writhing,
Malachi with his hands in leaf-litter,
a skink ensconced
in the soft city-flesh of his palm,
a scurry of children unconsciously
dabbed in candlebark oil,
anointed, the green-frocked myrtles
watching their initiation
like upstanding kin at a baptism,
the glorious reek and rot and breath
of the place, absorbed in pores
and spores once far enough removed
from suburbia’s concrete clutch.
Though I stand now in a cleared
space, the heady cologne
of those gnarled aunts, long disappeared
and the path to their graveyard,
machine-rippled, denuded,
ancestral seeds hide deep in clay;
inside me, hope grows, spindly at first,
a much-nurtured sapling.
Suzi Mezei is a Sri Lankan born Australian writer. She works on the lands of the Boonwurrung People. Themes include nature, animal ethics, social justice/injustice, feminism and environment.
Robbie Coburn
Crow Feathers
I used to collect the feathers of crows
I found on the farm
and place them on a shelf beside my bed.
I wondered why the crows were always here.
my Granny said they had hollow bones,
these scavengers leaving feathers as warnings,
death-birds flying above the farmland
where they are waiting
for those expected to die soon.
murders, holding funerals for each other
and awaiting ours.
I would imagine the end to their waiting,
the crows descending
on the lifeless carcasses of my family.
in the night,
I dreamed wind from an open window
would sweep the feathers
from the surface of the shelf.
an engulfed, black crest hovering
and circling me,
as they fell one by one,
covering my face and filling my mouth,
drowning me in a darkness
beyond sleep.
when I woke up
there was a scream from my body,
like the screeching
of thousands of crows overhead,
covering everything,
like rain.
Robbie Coburn is a poet based in Melbourne, Australia. His verse novel The Foal in the Wire will be published by Hachette Australia in 2025 and his most recent poetry collection is Ghost Poetry (Upswell, 2024). His website is robbiecoburn.com
¯
Joe Dolce
Brown Snake Crossover
Waltzing the track,
I catch my balance, back-
stepping with a Whoa!
as the luster rope shimmies, slow-
ly S-bending into bush,
before I can blink,
slink-
ing off, our
pas-de-deux
kaput.
Joe Dolce Composer/poet. Australian-American dual-national. Winner 2017 University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize. Longlist 2024 University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize. Highly Commended 2020 ACU Poetry Prize. Shortlist 2023, 2020 & 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize. Longlist 2024, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2014 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. Selected Best Australian Poems 2015 &
2014. Winner 25th Launceston Poetry Cup.
¯
Kit Kelen
bush week / in the cicadarama
Worimi Country
it falls to me to forget where I am
the city comes and goes
we’re here for the month of Sundays
this forest is 80kms long, 40 wide
just a thin strip, dairy, closing on the river now
a hundred years ago, no, more
one of the valley families
had a blistered man at blade
sharpening, always sharpening
his work was send the trees away
was keep them gone
axe and fire
was board and keep
and that was a hundred years
in my own recollection
the valley was all winter smoke
I call the middling winter
night’s more
light’s precious then
the stars are up to bright
spring is a season we’re here to imagine
leaves only fall with the wind
a tide of fire’s my summer fear
car’s packed and ready to go
I miss the ones we were
but can’t say always will
there’s flanelette unthreads the head
it falls to me to forget where I am
to hollow like the log
Kit Kelen is the winner of the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Prize
¯
Rose van Son
Petroglyphs Red Rock
Indee Station—
i.m. of the MMA crew killed in
Viscount 1750 air crash 31.12.1968
stories carved
lizard legs and arms
embrace the ochre rock
a stiff breeze sweeps the rocks clean
angled lines
dark shadows lever under granite
lizards climb
slide and climb again
tunnel wind-filled air
a year longed for and lost
burnished desert red
a new year not began
Oh! you have slipped the surly bonds*
an eagle witness
soars from here soars from here
*From John Gillespie Magee Jr.: High Flight
Rose van Son has been published in Westerly, Rabbit, ACU, Australian Poetry, Cordite and Glasgow Review. In 2022 she was Patron of the Perth Poetry Festival; in 2024 she was guest of the Shanghai International Poetry Festival. Her passions: nature, art, history, family. Cloak of Letters is her latest collection.
¯
S.K. Kelen
Lost in the Bush
Moonless night, Brindabellas,
a lone cyclist slowly
rides mountain bike
down pitch black
fire trail on the coldest,
hardest night of all
a freezing wind whistles
down and up the gullies
whistles a song of ice.
The ghosts of old Australia
are here, laughing and fierce.
Snow gums shout hooray
as a cold man freewheels
into a circle of sleeping kangaroos.
S. K. Kelen most recent book of poems is A Happening in Hades, (Puncher and Wattmann: Waratah NSW, 2020). His next volume, The Cult of What Comes Next, will be published by Puncher and Wattmann in early 2025.
¯
Danielle Welborn
By Kiowarrah Road
Someone split blue gums,
Crouching now in empty paddocks,
Slowly rotting fenceposts
Clutching rusting, antique wire.
Someone built a hut,
Papered walls with archaic adverts
That overlook rivulets of water
When the god of rain descends.
Someone raised a barren wool shed
To make the lusty wind groan,
The floorboards slowly greening
Beneath the weary, flapping roof.
Someone dosed dusty sheep
With a coloured medicine bottle.
It sits waiting, angular, crusted,
Half- buried in the dirt.
Someone shoed the local horses,
Hung horseshoes in the peach tree,
Luck careening slowly
Towards forgotten pasture.
Someone planted foreign trees,
So, in spring a million white blossoms
Could satisfy a delirious
Orchestra of honeybees.
Someone bathed beneath those trees
Next to a rusted-out water tank
In a bath that claws the ground,
Part-filled with a potpourri of leaves.
I hope your spirits rest.
Danielle Welborn is an emerging writer based on the Gold Coast. She writes poetry and short stories inspired by social and environmental issues, because this makes watching the news more interesting. When she isn’t writing, Danielle likes to rescue animals, plants and inanimate objects.
¯
MEUSE PRESS publishes this collection.
All work © the authors.
¯
Copyright © collection Meuse Press
All individual pieces copyright their creator.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, fair dealing for the purpose of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Copyright owners may take legal action against a person or organisation who infringes their copyright through unauthorised copying. All enquiries should be directed to the publisher at the address above.
For avoidance of doubt, Authors reserve the rights, and Meuse Press has no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text, including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless Meuse Press obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does Meuse Press have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies to generate text without Author’s specific and express permission.
Meuse Press acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which this work was created, the Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation, and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
