Poems


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  • Rimbaud in Africa
    By Bella Li

    I am sending you a bird’s head in a steel box filled with alcohol. I believe this 
               bird is unique to the Harar area; it is  known here as koumou.Perhaps you 
               saw it when you were here. It is the size of a large turkey, and is completely 
               black.

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  • Summoning The River Snake
    By Fiona Britton

    Click here to read the full poem in the poet's original format.
    Summoning the river snake: a death journey in five parts
     
    … in which the poet Dorothy Porter summons her muse and death messenger, a snake, and makes a final journey.

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  • For The Young
    By Celestine Rowe

    It’s time for our young people to rise
    Take the fight laid before us
    Let’s rise to the challenges 
    We fight against depression, oppression, suicide

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  • Emerald City
    By Aden Rolfe

    Everyone knows the story: boy meets bay, sets up
    colony, steals country. Now the waterfront sets are
    brighter than ever, bolstered by breakfast radio &
    cameo bridge views / while backstage the Cooks River

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  • Fitzroy Commission Flats
    By Melody Paloma

    Poem after Jennifer Rankin
    can’t catch how the light hits the flats, at seven PM in early summer,
    my iPhone camera never gets it right: 
    bedroom wall cracked open 

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  • shoot
    By Renee Pettitt-Schipp

    I will not close     I will not let
                                so much as one petal curl
                                                    as long as this light can reach me.
    So long as the clear

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  • From The Other Side
    By Judith Rodriguez

    The dead do not stay dead. There’s your Dad
    teaching kids still in the voice of Oodgeroo;
    for punishment, putting the kids on cut and dried
    mission rations – that’s unsurprising news

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  • Untitled
    By Celestine Rowe

    We rose up from the darkness, where they kept us all along
    We shine bright, smiling, never letting go of what could become
    The vision held inside, we grab them tight
    The dream even though it seemed for ever to become real

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  • Tiger on the Beach
    By Renee Pettitt-Schipp

    We round the point, run
    into the plate-glass shock
    of your presence.
    Who designed

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  • Ballad at Manifold's
    By Judith Rodriguez

    I remember you, Kath, the quiet woman
    sat with Kate on a bench at Manifolds’:
    our mandolines. Those Saturdays, the Wynnum
    river-flats, a hawk circling, the ballads scored

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  • Silvereye
    By Renee Pettitt-Schipp

    unblinking eye
    looking out toward forever
    the birdbath is reflective
    high on stand

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  • Names
    By Judith Rodriguez

    Amity
    A ship under sail: a sighting: a sandy beach
    offers its point to the neighbour island, offers
    a watering place. A safe station, on the way 

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  • Old Ghost Dogs
    By Sam Wagan Watson

    “Some things are beyond talking.
                                                         Not the mind, not emotions,
                                                 words will always come for them.
                                          Perhaps the mind lives in this barrier

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  • Maya Angelou
    By Abe Nouk

    The world is a mixture of everybody, everywhere
    and she was a child and shall remain so
    in the eyes of those who came before her
    it matters not where from to make us feel

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  • Moongalba
    By Judith Rodriguez

    Place holds the people. They wander, making a life – place is inside them,
    staking its claims, reserving its treasures. 
                   What place? Maybe the space by a mother, between her bed and the wall. Or the backyards of a childhood. It may be an endless plain with its secrets for living. 
                   For Oodgeroo, the green island in the se…

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  • Unnamed
    By Celestine Rowe

    Power to the struggle, whatever that may be
    Whatever you’re feeling, rise higher
    Give it all you got ‘cause you’re stronger
    No matter what life throws at ya

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  • Last Drinks
    By Aden Rolfe

    ‘Your vocation calls
    & you answer it’
                                  John Forbes, ‘Pacific’
     

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  • Damaged Glamour
    By Aden Rolfe

    ‘Why didn’t life turn out the way it looked
    in Cronulla in 1967?’ Or at least
    how it does in a Go-Betweens film clip?
    On the streets of this town no one cares where

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  • Wiped
    By Sam Wagan Watson

    For Martin Harrison
                                                 “I sing the joy of wandering 
                     and the pleasure of the wandering death …”
                                                          Guillaume Apollinaire

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  • This City
    By Celestine Rowe

    I love this city
    Creativeness, words, they flow
    From the gutters to the tips of high rise buildings
    Artistic alleyways

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