Tribute to Women at St LuJa, St Kilda Art Crawl

Ghost baby

Possum on the balustrade
holds on with tiny hands,
possum tail hanging
under the yellow porch light

with a ragged coat and a gammy eye
looking like something resurrected
from the sodden earth
under the fallen leaves

as if a ghost baby had climbed the stairs
on mincing feet and sits and stares
curious outside my door
as if we'd known each other
years before.

Noon

a cabbage butterfly

         lands wings as white as   icing sugar

  on a spike of lavender    to drink

         from tiny flutes     blown

     with  butterflies  in  mind       as  if

 at   a   wedding  with   a   thousand   guests

Pop-up Poetry at St Luja

Locals Lisa Wood, Marian Webb, Hamish Danks Brown and Yoram Symons pop up at:

St Luja Whisky Cellar
9 Fitzroy Street, St Kilda

Sunday 27 May, 2-3 pm

St Kilda Art Crawl

Event No. 7

Hamish Danks Brown

 a.k.a. “Danksta Downunder” has performed across Australia, North America, Europe and Asia and published frequently in anthologies, journals and online. He moved here two years ago to join the Melbourne spoken word & poetry community. Danks Street in St Kilda is named after his great great grandfather John Danks.

 Marian Webb

 poet and author of Moon Haiku and Dreams. Online she appears in Antique Children, The Stolen Poem and Edgar Allen Poet magazines, while regularly publishing new poems on social media including Toorak Times. A denizen of St Kilda, she performs at diverse events on the Melbourne poetry scene. 

Yoram Symons

 a slam poet from Melbourne, Australia. He is an Australian Poetry Slam State Finalist, Melbourne Spoken Word Prize Finalist, and winner of the 2017 Grounded Battle of the Arts Spoken Word Competition. Yoram’s poetry weaves his identity into issues of politics, spirituality and evolutionary transformation.

 Lisa Wood

 local singer-songwriter, based in Elwood. Her first rock concert ever was at age 7, when she saw WINGS at the Sydney Myer Music Bowl. Her CD LEMON'S has received airplay - "Lemons - great song for a St Kilda sunrise stagger," according to Scotty Thwaites, presenter of ON THE PATIO, 3 WAY-FM.

All welcome.

Aquamarine

Salt—
     a grain of disbelief,
     a cleanser of wounds.
     I swim in salt water across lanes—away
     from the groove of illusion.

Awake
     I must go to the sea,
     my skin tricked out in leopard spots.
     Diatribes wander my meridians,
     my water and wood, my metal and fire,
     my scapula, my little finger.
     A baby bird tips its head back, agape.
     An embryo feeds through an umbilicus,
     an apple in its crop.

Risen
     I follow the zig-zag lanes down to the aquamarine.
     The sun is an apple sweetening the morning.
     Clouds fall from my eyes.

Cricket luck

Cricket in the house!
Good luck

blown in on cricket wings
up three stories into my lilies,
wilted in the five-day drought --

in at the window, hops
into the cool of my living room
with flurries of dust.

I've been away.
Home, I sweep
the littered pile.

Cricket air-borne,
black head a gleam,
wings shine, thighs pop
out of dimension.

Cricket in the house!
Good luck! Good health
chirps in a hidden seam.

Lunar eclipse

What a spectacle! 
We see the earth get in the way —
or is it the moon swinging over the earth,
the sun underneath?

Earth's shadow slithers across the white-light face
stealthily as a clock, ticking a month of phases
on a clear evening.

Brilliant crescents slim and dim down to an eery orb.
The hare on its haunches sits low-key at mid-heaven,
rust on a magic lantern.

Meaning what — what can it mean,
the extraordinary passage of a shadow
across the beautiful moon?

Her fierce light burns
ringing silver,
eroded and remade.