Poems

Natalie Cooke’s ‘Bird Song’

from 100 Poets

Last year I began a list of birds at my window
recording their whims and peregrinations, and my own 
imperfect knowledge (and lack of application).
Currawong, it starts boldly, cuckoo-shrike, wattlebird
before some sort of thornbills (?) – all brown…
Perhaps they’ll return.

I dug out a field guide, dived into descriptors, 
compared fuscous and rufous, ratite and struthious,
then sounded out dihedral, superloral, nidifugous.

I composed a silent chorus of plaintive warble, 
falling reels and froglike croaks 
with a counterpoint of whip-crack
thin tinkling, scolding notes.

Paper’s a pied piper; I twitched adjectives
for hours, staked out nouns, pished verbs,
deaf to my surroundings, tail-up in words.

Then this evening three currawongs—
all black against the reddening dusk—
called a question through the glass
and I looked up and 
heard.

from The Beast Should Comply

Filthy because first, I fell from a family
of fifty. No explanation save Fusion, that it fed
the lilies with death until time
became thin, brittle, expired in a long, pathetic
stouche. Stouche: run aground — blue canoes (why
blue? — as an antidote to the narrator’s filth) are picked up
by painted warriors & carried into a dense forest, never
to be seen again, a gratuitous image whose only purpose
apparently is to disrupt the flow
of the narrative. Stouche: how long
can a breath last? Eighty seconds? Ample time
to let them pass. How many were there? Too many
to count. Mares or stallions? Couldn’t tell
with all the dust. Should I make them blind, add
an unnecessary complication to a narrative
already burdened with one superfluous image (blue
canoes)? Stouche: a stampede
into a feast where the rationing is exceptionally
strict that sends them flying as befits a narrative
that extols the pieta-like austerity of a mother & son
huddled together on a drifting raft (Niagara thundering
in the distance) who can’t get over the fact that the tombs
(with which both shores are lined) are so ... prophetic, so
stouche as prayers for salvation are answered only
to run afoul of the Law. Too supernatural, this
phenomenon, there could be a panic. Clear the court
of spectators! (&, by extension, the streets of filth
with a water cannon). Stouche: clean
because last, the narrative reduced (by a neat
solipsism) to the narrator, that family of fifty
of no further use.

Lizz Murphy’s ‘The Woman in Blue’

from Bitumen Psalms

the woman in blue
all weathers
walks
like it’s killing her

ponchoed walker
orange flame spiralling
through long grass

she blows a trail of smoke
gently taps her ciggie
they keep her company
ash flakes float

the blushing moon
her cigarette burns

Jean Kent’s ‘IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE’

from The Language of Light

My nieces and nephews are chasing me up the wall. 
In my mother’s house they are mustered
year by year, just as I was: A.J.C. 30/8/63 
(five foot two) pencil brands in paint. 

Heels tight against the floor ankles strained 
careless as shanghais they aim themselves up 
quiver as their grandmother
flattens curly heads with the carving knife 
& pins them like chrysalises to the wall. 

(1963. My two brothers straight as arrows 
shoot past me, threatening the ceiling where possums 
and cobwebs hide the bullseye. Our first year
in this house. I had done all my growing.
I had left it climbing with small sharp feet in the houses 
which came before. My brothers with their eyes on the sky 
stuck their fingers to skin-thin balsa, floated model 
aeroplanes over their beds and over the paddock
of palely shooting carnation-leaved stock feed; 
talked of piloting jets, Mathematics permitting. 
I began to look horizontally         as far
as America in full colour copies of Life:
John F. Kennedy with a fatal, choirboy grin.)

1981. Up the wall now delicate as insects
my nieces and nephews leave their marks. 
Somewhere in the flat distance, patterns of houses 
like nomads’ tents — at the heart of each
one single pole        a ladder
of wounded paint. In the steamy dust 
the deserts we planned to cross wait still. 
Memories, slick mirages, blind us. Here all our lives 
settle back to this: on a wall, marks
of moths’ feet, reaching for the sky.

Odveig Klyve’s The Farmer’s Pear Tree

from Let’s Take the Blue Sky by Storm

the  farmer
looks at the pear tree
 outside       	the	          window
the			old			 tree				that
 spring                 after		spring	welcomes                 birds
 they	return			resting                      their		wings 
after		            	millions		        of				miles
 they		build			nests		and			sing
about				what		they		have				seen
 the     	forests	 of				steel			and		concrete 
the			dark	                            clouds	           and			sunrises 
the		sounds	of			waves				and			 weasels 
with                sharp      claws		they            scrawl       the      songs 
into         the         bark	 of			 the	 old	tree
year		by	year
 e v e r y	m o r n i n g
t h e	f a r m e r 
s p e l l s
o u t	 t h e 
t i m e
t h a t ‘ s 
h i d d e n
 i n	a
b i r d ‘ s
a l p h a b e t

Richard Tipping‘s ‘Lord Muck’

from Instant History

Picturing England
Headlands in a fattening breeze
The fragrant country
Its dark wet soil.

This pot boiled over long ago
Oozing migrants
Threading identities
Bicycle couriers urgent as bells.

Rough winds shock blossom
petals heap pink snow
Swirl up in gusts black taxi
Smut to the gutter press.

The history winners get written by
War’s cut bloodlines of before
Lord Muck must have stamped
this tongue with claws.

Cui Yuwei’s ‘Junkman’

from Fish Bones

half-naked, trawls through garbage
every day in the neighbourhood

the last items I see
him take home after sunset

are two scraps of gold armour
the sun has forged on his shoulders

Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang’s ‘first night in Macao’

from Encounters: Never Random

after five hours of floating
in the air

 or a hundred years
since the sailing

 a great escape
 my great grandfather did

 this place he transited
 now I’ll call it home

he could never
return

in flesh
his blood

that flows in me
now here afoot

he used to walk 
or maybe run

whose house?

Iris Fan Xing’s ‘Smog’

from South of Words

when street lights are smudged
when high-rises lose their grids
when the city submits to abstraction
on a red alarm night 
on an east-bound train
silence behind masks
warning ring in the ears 
smog herds us home

it was in early summer when I last saw you 
around Travessa da Paixão
you told me you’d eventually 
move to the mainland and I replied 
I’d go overseas

don’t know why but parting 
always reminds me of drifting clouds 
maybe because I know that Xu Zhimo poem 
embarrassingly well and you’ll agree with me 
a seaside town like Macao presents 
the best kind of summer cloud
generous in volume and almost tangible
the same kind in Perth in winter
with colours like the orange and pink
in Bonnard’s le bol de lait

now as we emerge from another hutong 
branched out from the Drum Tower
counting yellow and red halos 
cast by street lamps on our way to DDC
I’ve forgotten the air is toxic 
and wish instead 
with dust’s magic trick
a seedling will appear on my palm
and then I can watch it sprout 
leaf by leaf and on a rainy day

strive to catch every droplet 
from returning clouds