Poems
-
cell safety
By Claire Albrechtwhen you rub your eyes
deep with long fingernails
you feel the push and pull
of the rubbing tides -
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 -
How Water Works
By Tony Birchcup a hand
skin and bone
this water well
a beating heart -
sun glint drift
By Anne Elveya name for what speaks this day to
water
as creek replies
mirror -
PYROCENE TRIPTYCH
By Luke DaviesI: MAHOUT, YELLING
Waking up to still the wind was basic
narcissism and yet the same might be said -
Avicennia marina
By Georgina ReidSoft chimneys shoot
skyward through mud
breathing in never out.
Pneumatophores, they’re called -
Pellucid dreaming
By Anne CaseyI
To be as complete as the greater part of your self
composed -
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… -
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, -
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 ~ -
Satellite view downwards
By Raynen Bajette O'Keefebread under ocean
scarfs under ocean
prams under ocean
spatula under ocean -
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 -
Rainclouds are capricious
By Magdelena BallThis is the last love song, I swear
watching your slow demise
on someone else’s television.
-
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 -
answer
By Eunice Andradaduring the crescendo of the blaze
the sky is a memory of water
-
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
-
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 -
Unhooking the Lip
By Sean Westfor Courtney Sina Meredith
She cups my name in her hands
like an undersized fish, unhooks -
the poem begins with a breathing reef
By Eunice Andradaa new cemetery blooms in the heat
we search for the last traces of colour
