Poets & Poems
cell safety
By Claire Albrecht
when you rub your eyes
deep with long fingernails
you feel the push and pull
of the rubbing tides
these slippery, wet pools
inside your skull, you rub
and rub ...
answer
By Eunice Andrada
during the crescendo of the blaze
the sky is a memory of water
elsewhere a country of rain
where water visits without
invitation
its deluge of questions
flowing back to ...
The Disappearing
The Disappearing has been redeveloped and we invite you to submit your poems about fading and disappeared places and spaces. Explore now »
sanctuary
By Eunice Andrada
for the Murray-Darling Basin
clusters of cod float
on their sides, shaping a new absence
iridescence draining
from ancient scales under the sun
another year of drought manufactured
by the ...
the poem begins with a breathing reef
By Eunice Andrada
a new cemetery blooms in the heat
we search for the last traces of colour
among ivory skeletons
beyond us our plastic descendants
float further than we ever could
how ...
Rainclouds are capricious
By Magdelena Ball
This is the last love song, I swear
watching your slow demise
on someone else’s television.
Ice cubes popping
make a watery song
soothing and deadly
on an invisible ...
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 ...
Black Ophelia
By Tony Birch
deny the cross
the holy word
deny the gun
the wire and hoe
caste and colour
theft of ground of bodies
go and be and be
with the drifting river ...
Birrarung Billabong
By Tony Birch
Sitting 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 ...
How Water Works
By Tony Birch
cup a hand
skin and bone
this water well
a beating heart
of molecules life
one two three
thousand years
twice daily rises
to gently fall again
flow stories asking ...
Pellucid dreaming
By Anne Casey
I
To be as complete as the greater part of your self
composed
To trust without knowing when to hang on
how to let go
To have the ability to ...
From Initiation to Ideation
By Luke Davies
Bonfire 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
and yet here the ...
PYROCENE TRIPTYCH
By Luke Davies
I: MAHOUT, YELLING
Waking up to still the wind was basic
narcissism and yet the same might be said
of the mosquito seeing the balcony door
as the gateway to ...
sun glint drift
By Anne Elvey
a name for what speaks this day to
water
as creek replies
mirror
a woman is not the
scene
this is private
talk
though she witnesses a multitude of small ...
Submerged
By Jane Gibian
Slips of fish like smears of transparence:
the lagoon shallow and humming
where paperbark branches scrape
in the wind near four men in the surf’s
wildness, ringed by extrusions ...
what school never taught me
By Shona Hawkes
how 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 ...
When Dolphins Bring Gifts
By Anna Jacobson
These creatures sense changes
in currents ~ during the pandemic,
dolphins bring gifts ~ sea-treasures
to lure disappearing humans back ~
sea sponges, barnacled bottles, coral.
For cod, dolphins wash ashore
King Neptune ...
We are the Stars and the Sea
By Paris Lay-Yee
They tell us we’re made of bones and skin.
Of cells and blood and genes.
But what they mean to say is
that there is
stardust
in our veins ...