Poems
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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 -
Submerged
By Jane GibianSlips of fish like smears of transparence:
the lagoon shallow and humming
where paperbark branches scrape -
There is Nothing Heavier Than a River
By Georgina ReidIt’s the water that pins
us down.
Our flighty atoms,
our fizzy ideas, -
PYROCENE TRIPTYCH
By Luke DaviesI: MAHOUT, YELLING
Waking up to still the wind was basic
narcissism and yet the same might be said -
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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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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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, -
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Avicennia marina
By Georgina ReidSoft chimneys shoot
skyward through mud
breathing in never out.
Pneumatophores, they’re called -
When Dolphins Bring Gifts
By Anna JacobsonThese creatures sense changes
in currents ~ during the pandemic,
dolphins bring gifts ~ sea-treasures
to lure disappearing humans back ~ -
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 -
the poem begins with a breathing reef
By Eunice Andradaa new cemetery blooms in the heat
we search for the last traces of colour -
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 -
sun glint drift
By Anne Elveya name for what speaks this day to
water
as creek replies
mirror -
Pellucid dreaming
By Anne CaseyI
To be as complete as the greater part of your self
composed -
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 -
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… -
answer
By Eunice Andradaduring the crescendo of the blaze
the sky is a memory of water
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Unhooking the Lip
By Sean Westfor Courtney Sina Meredith
She cups my name in her hands
like an undersized fish, unhooks -
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.
