Poems
End of slideshow carousel
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How Water Works
By Tony Birchcup a hand
skin and bone
this water well
a beating heart -
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 -
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… -
Magnifications
By Ann ShenfieldBefore she connected the headphones
to the tree she said
I’ve been told that ice cracking
sounds like a child screaming -
answer
By Eunice Andradaduring the crescendo of the blaze
the sky is a memory of water
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Avicennia marina
By Georgina ReidSoft chimneys shoot
skyward through mud
breathing in never out.
Pneumatophores, they’re called -
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 -
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. -
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, -
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 -
There is Nothing Heavier Than a River
By Georgina ReidIt’s the water that pins
us down.
Our flighty atoms,
our fizzy ideas, -
Satellite view downwards
By Raynen Bajette O'Keefebread under ocean
scarfs under ocean
prams under ocean
spatula under ocean -
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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sun glint drift
By Anne Elveya name for what speaks this day to
water
as creek replies
mirror -
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 -
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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 -
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. -
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