Category Longer Poetry

by Jan Napier While I was out it hatched split and quit its chrysalis on a first leaf dull wet wings folded to a thorax boxy and squat. lumpen stubby moveless till moonlight wrote silver on russet limned antennae fanned…

by Jan Napier bucket upturned. ash cloud. flue open. a match to crosshatched kindling, violet white flame lizard tongues twigs. chimney trickles blue. ceramic portals pried aside, another chunk thrust among the half-charred. kettle set to one side wisps. porridge…

by Earl Livings That dazzle tree down the path with its reels of red flowers, roots that cling, sap that flows past robust rings of heartwood, green that springs from light, turns to light, is one note in the wild…

by Earl Livings After a day of grey listless clouds and drizzle that fades and returns, a plane tree, with green, orange-yellow, copper-brown shrivelling leaves shimmered by streetlights— a roost for small black shapes. They are bickering, scolding, chatting, swooning,…

by J F Garrow Just some light is coming through the windows of this church where Some of them are sitting: some of them just sitting in the lights Of the windows of this church here. And also, there’s St…

by Andrew Hede He takes a moment to register that the boy’s shrieks of delight have changed in pitch and depth from the thrill of chilly waves slapping playfully against his sun-soaked body, to the agony of blue tentacles wrapping…

by Andrew Hede Incessant cacophony of unseen insects: pulsating rhythms, syncopated percussion, staccato strumming of cicadas interrupted by footstep vibrations triggering a Mexican wave of silence. Frenetic chatter-songs of excited birds: kookaburras raucousing, lorikeets shrilling, macho mating call of a…

by Ron Wilkins Each summer we would go there, Paula, the three small children and I and the thing we most liked to do was walk the several kilometres above the tree-line to Mount Kosciuszko, then return along the track…

by Laurie Keim Step quietly, listen, there at the edge of the page dark bottom of ocean, nozzle taken from your mouth and bubbles return skyward without any sound and soon nothing is anything else but silence. Don’t confuse manic…

by Rodney Williams outside Marvel Stadium at Docklands in Naarm on the country of the Kulin nation All that’s left here now of Batman’s Hill is a stout square pole, its red paint fading on a tall fabrication, installed stiff…