Poems
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There is Nothing Heavier Than a River
By Georgina ReidIt’s the water that pins
us down.
Our flighty atoms,
our fizzy ideas, -
the poem begins with a breathing reef
By Eunice Andradaa new cemetery blooms in the heat
we search for the last traces of colour -
Coastal
By Brooke ScobieSalt crusted.
Ever lingering
Remnants of my ancestors.
I allowed them to settle and fall away, -
Birrarung Billabong
By Tony BirchSitting with your open coffin thinking and not thinking I want to be with the world and you. I knock against the grain of wood and want to know if you remember the day we took the bikes to the river and rode along the bank against a current willing us home to safety. At the billabong we circled sacred water, threw away our shoes and socks and spla… -
Memoir of water
By Esther OttawayFrom toddlerhood: a memory of careful bending
and plashing my baby hand in the Huon’s edge.
My childhood learning held in a saltwater brain;
my solitary mother walking her babies by the river. -
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From Initiation to Ideation
By Luke DaviesBonfire as initiation. Nothing, not even
meaning, was ever not metaphor. Try
as I might I could not experience the slow
degranulation of sandstone into sand -
cell safety
By Claire Albrechtwhen you rub your eyes
deep with long fingernails
you feel the push and pull
of the rubbing tides -
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Above The Twilight Zone
By Sara MorgilloThe surface rises
slowly
Creeps up shoreline, as we beckon it closer behind our backs
Spreads oil floats bags and bottles -
Low Tide in the Mangroves
By Georgina ReidWhen the tide has slipped
to the other side,
when the water’s succumbed
to songs of distant sand, -
Pellucid dreaming
By Anne CaseyI
To be as complete as the greater part of your self
composed -
Rainclouds are capricious
By Magdalena BallThis is the last love song, I swear
watching your slow demise
on someone else’s television.
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Homecoming
By Peter MitchellWas it the rainy moon? A longing for reanimation?
Or a reminder to us of the sound we had lost? Forgotten?
Two weeks before for a week, the vault above had warned us.
During those days, an oyster sky for an hour here, there spoke -
Avicennia marina
By Georgina ReidSoft chimneys shoot
skyward through mud
breathing in never out.
Pneumatophores, they’re called -
PYROCENE TRIPTYCH
By Luke DaviesI: MAHOUT, YELLING
Waking up to still the wind was basic
narcissism and yet the same might be said -
Magnifications
By Anne ShenfieldBefore she connected the headphones
to the tree she said
I’ve been told that ice cracking
sounds like a child screaming -
sun glint drift
By Anne Elveya name for what speaks this day to
water
as creek replies
mirror -
The Story of the Flood
By Anastasia RadievskaSitting in the wet garden you smashed the land like a cup
– your legs were moving
over a patch of firmament – chant-drying
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The Act of Water
By Duy Quang Mai& we thought american, european atlantic
is the best option
– in each litre of sea salt, there
are foreign dreams