A Year in Poems 2024
If 2024 was a poem list, this would be it.
As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the extraordinary poetry commissioned in 2024 across our many projects.
From Poem Forest to the Red Room Fellowship, from Poetry Month to MAD Poetry and beyond, we’ve curated twelve exceptional poems for you to enjoy this Summer break.
1.
"Happy to have made it this far
That was your answer
Never forget that voice
I’ll never forget them stories
Old fulla.
Can see those stories
Like there my memories."
2.
"I’d always thought of my heart like machine,
some suspended thing held together with string.
But with you, planets orbit around this beating sun
as if bodies are a galaxy of our own making."
3.
"This is a poem about how we couldn’t write a poem.
We talk in the comments about how we couldn’t write the poem.
We find tiny pockets of time to explain how we couldn’t write the poem.
We set up a WhatsApp Group to explain why we can’t write the poem.
We send emails about why we can’t write the poem.
And then, we realise, we have written the poem."
4.
"My mother planted you the day I was born.
I grew with you.
I remember trying to stick your leaves back on in autumn;
I was scared of you changing."
5.
"Burri burri yanggum, burri burri gali, burri burri miru
I always was, I always am, I always will be
Close your eyes and listen
yindi ngaa goori, yindi ngara mubera"
6.
"I imagine outside where Peter must be.
Can he even fly? Project his body in the sky?
For a bird with cut wings, there’s so much at stake."
7.
"He must have heard the cries of children
in his sleep,
their lowing.In his tower,
you breathe lungfuls in
of sky."
8.
"where is my heart? —rotting at the bottom of the pacific ocean
hurled out the side of the plane
because i didn’t have the cash.and my mouth, full
of borrowed words
worn into bloody riverbeds."
9.
"I close my eyes,
Releasing countless butterflies—
They are my aspirations.
Finding a home within my chest,
Not landless, not displaced,
Not tortured, not blistered,
But sheltered in the warmth of my dreams."
10.
"I held out my hand and offered the dry bread of
honest love and it bit my head off."
11.
"• Redbull doesn’t give you wings (at least not like the Mental Health Act does)
• the end of the world is closer than you think (mine ended once already)
• if you want to be a saint, you must first become a child (yes, saints too tell lies)"
12.
"A garden paradise floating in a basement furniture store.
Larrikin heels on wood varnish, your home a museum, helmet
an archive box holding seventy years — of yarn, furphy, flashness,
spree & lore banging about in black steel — everything but the skull."