Poems
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Satellite view downwards
By Raynen Bajette O'Keefebread under ocean
scarfs under ocean
prams under ocean
spatula under ocean -
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… -
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Barrier Reef
By JV Birch(formerly Great)
The map is neatly new. The paper, parchment. An artist’s impression. Picture book perfect. Not to be used as a navigational aid. I travel the length of Queensland in seconds. Swathes of thick green meet powder blue. A ribbon of colour ghosts its edge with bursts of pink and yellow, orange and purple. Coral before the climate effec… -
Calling it by another name - Easter Sunday, 8am
By Jenny PollakHow cool the sea looks
all those blue miles to itself
the sun on the estuary. -
Left brain in a bind
By Margaret Owen Ruckert‘A four-year-old in Australia has witnessed on media over 10 deaths by drowning.’
Statistics don’t lie around like sunbathers
but in a healthy respect for the call of water -
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 -
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. -
Ocean Nocturne
By Esther OttawayA vinegar sky, the moon with its mouth full of cloud.
My words arrive in a squall of leaves, my silences
knotted as dragnets. You gather them up like a prophet,
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Wherever you are, there is always a giraffe
By Esther OttawayWherever you are, there is always a giraffe
after Judy Johnson
Cool as a whale
Mrs Haydon is stepping backwards through water -
Unhooking the Lip
By Sean Westfor Courtney Sina Meredith
She cups my name in her hands
like an undersized fish, unhooks -
We are the Stars and the Sea
By Paris Lay-YeeThey tell us we’re made of bones and skin.
Of cells and blood and genes.
But what they mean to say is -
Rainclouds are capricious
By Magdelena BallThis is the last love song, I swear
watching your slow demise
on someone else’s television.
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cell safety
By Claire Albrechtwhen you rub your eyes
deep with long fingernails
you feel the push and pull
of the rubbing tides -
You’re
By Stuart Barnesafter Sylvia Plath’s ‘You’re’
a cardinal wing tilting sideways for
a sodden-spined god on an airy desk.
Perturbed by Neptune, a centaur. -
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 -
The Tower
By Emily Crocker0.
put down the tower of rooms you carry
summit to summit like a boulder
home is a leaking cup never filling but can be -
what school never taught me
By Shona Hawkeshow long it takes to heal a barren riverbank
how to keep the faith that the water birds will return
how to train your eyes to see a flash of platypus
hoarding is a crime, not a conquest -
The Monster
By Jess PetersWhen I was born, I lived with a monster,
But when I turned one, I only lived with my mother,
When I was two, he would kidnap me,
In the late hours of the night, around quarter to three,
