Wind circles

The wind quickens the trees
twisting the gleam in little circles.

The trees
shuffle their heads full of green
friction of leaves.

The wind shifts
all around the world
in miraculous rings.

Here it shivers on summer
chilled in the melting Antarctic.

The grass mutters, the guttering groans,
bird whistles displaced
from wall to gate.

The wind is discontented.
It cannot stand in any one place
for any length of time.

It stirs the pedestrians’ minds to flight,
it whips up sagas with twisted plots

and impossible endings
then begins again.

Kintzukuroi

A pot falls

on hard ground

of rock and stone.

(Hear it smash!)

 

Shards burst

forever and never

seen on earth or sky.

(Let them fly!)

 

What remains,

bound for mortar

mixed with gold.

(See it shine!)

 

Coherent sits

the kintzukuroi pot,

a piece of parts

and gold.

Love and art

Loving is an art:

but I ask you, what is art?

 

Intangible qualities attach

to a habit, a pattern, a lattice

that allows improvisation

a mad brush, a breath of soul.

 

If your soul were a vision

what colour would you be?

Warm or cool, could you name it?

 

If tangible what texture,

silken or bristled?

 

And what shape:

are you a swan

or a brindled bat?

 

Give me a frame to suit you:

are you circular or square?

A triangle perhaps.

 

And as for composition

do you dominate the foreground,

or is that you

slipping away to the left?

 

Only a detail of your face remains.

Only your finger with that curious ring.

 

And then you’re gone,

a memory – that’s all.

 

I recall the day, that hour, that light,

when your voice first touched me,

the imprint irrevocable.

 

Love, I discern the edge of you glowing and hazy.

I might force the search for a definite line.

I might make of you an image never dreamed.

But love unfree is never love to me.

 

 

Rain comes to Australia

Crickets sing in the wet grass

behind the garden tap.

Crickets sing in the geraniums’

joyous greenery.

Rain strafes the streets of the cities.

Hail like golf balls pelts the lawns.

Rain douses the fires of Australia.

Rain quenches the drought-dry heart of Australia.

Rain saves us. Thunder and lightning 

spell the word of God.

Rain has come to douse the fires of Australia.

Thank God for the rain.

Smoke

A pall descended on St Kilda 

has bleached the high summer day.

White cirrus floats in a white sky

on a breeze from the east – Gippsland ablaze.

The scent of wood smoke appals

stealing through the summer night

in at the window from the burning forest.

Out of control the bushfires

burn the country down.

Animals scream to extinction

and the trees and the trees and the towns

Mallacoota, Mago, Cobargo

melted into the ground.

I cannot stand the scent of a winter hearth

and a billion creatures dead in agony.

I cannot count the cost of a hard heart

that loves a lump of coal more than a planet.

Dramatis Personae II

Add caption

Moon play

The moon’s hare sits on her haunches,

her ears a-glimmer with night.

She leaps in circles around the earth.

Such a shadow play, a movie! 

Silhouettes flicker on a gleaming

silver screen round as an eye.

Dear moon, bright moon, look down

with your hare-filled eye. Let your light

swim into the garden like a little fish.

Spangles splash among the shadows,

silvering the weeds.

Dazzling bright, stung with light.

 Hare on her haunches sits. 

An ear flops over her eye.

Down into the garden I go after midnight

not knowing how, somnambulant, white shining.

I fly along Punt Road to catch the late, late,

late-night bus.  A car near misses.  I am nearly

white shine on the asphalt.

The moon long set lies chuckling under the earth.

Like lava, but cold.

A rock with a hare-filled eye.

Heart a glitter

Sunshine through the rain-hazed pane
shatters into rainbows.

What of perfect form —
an arc, a circle, a perfect
diffraction?

A world in a window
haloed to distraction.

Light like love
ensouls an old rose.
Colours spill on the cold stone.

The summer sun sets
in a riot of rose.

The rain-hazed pane
is blooming.

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.

Dream

How do we hobble towards love?
Hobble I do through the dim streetscape
to the four-winged statue
poised on the horizon

The little girl weeps,
struck with a switch.
I croon to her like a mother.
I brush her hair,
I untangle it like thoughts,
so many dark worms writhing
from tiny follicles,
seeking voices and tongues.

Her shock uncoils in silken waves,
strata of silt immemorial
packed in the immaculate river bed.

Angel of love enfold us
in your blood heat and feathers.
Stone be warm.  Embrace us
in the boon of love.

Saturday 25th March at the Lyrebird

Poster by Helena Ashton, vocalist with Noir.

Light

Sun in the glass,
a spangle — a spark!

Light let loose lets loose
epiphanies

hidden unseen and in between
a particle, a wave.

Light bends a band of rainbows
scattered at the scattered brim.

Light tells a million fortunes
in the echo of a window.

Light lures a host of angels
to toast eternal morning.

Strings of worlds rise like bubbles
in the shining flute.

After these years

of trillion transformations

I'll find myself wandering,
seeking a new form.

My bodiless eyes
will grow accustomed to phantoms
and colours that don't exist.

I'll wear the ghosts of my hands and hair.
I'll walk on the ghosts of my feet
along immaterial highways —

counting as I go unearthly trees
that flower and fruit
berries embedded in whorls of thorns.

Will I meet ogres? Angels? Stars?
Spirits from abandoned temples?
Megafauna of unborn planets?

I'll taste the fruit of the ghost thorn tree.
Its juice runs redder than my dead heart.

I'll remember it beating
the measure of my years
in my evanescent chest
at the centre of my flame.

Illumination

Un verre d’eau éclaire le monde

                                          Jean Cocteau 

A clean gleam —
the world is washed
upside-down in a tumbler.

A branching tree
climbs and delves
a perfect round.

A sheer aubade —
a host of parallels —
hallows the sky

and still I rise
up among the steeples,
gleaning meanings

and mirrored vigils.
All the streets and buildings
are jumbled sigils

swimming in a tremble
on the table-top.