Welcome to The Greenhouse, the Poets Union’s e-anthology of poems about the environment.

The environment is a big issue, and it is one in which many poets take a strong interest, so it seemed a natural topic for the website to host.

This anthology, featuring the work of Poets Union members, will be mounted in three tranches: in April, August and December. We are taking a consecutive approach as a way of stimulating interest over the whole of the year: hopefully, people will return to the collection as more poems get added – and perhaps even respond to some of the work with poems of their own.

Thank you to all the poets who contributed their work to the first mounting. We hope to see even more of you involved as the year proceeds.

Martin Langford, Editor

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Susan Adams

Trees Bequeath Carbon Plains of Breathlessness

Susan Adams is a Sydney poet who has been published in anthologies, e-zines, and hard copy journals both in Australia and internationally.

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Brian Anketell

Darling River

By his side, the lover’s heart, faithful to her wayfaring rivulet
Inclined and striving, bearing down to draggle the glazed course

Dismal to observe from heaven’s height, gloomy and doleful to discern
Stricken and distressed, a lover’s heart weighed down and heavy

From the brink still and all, the lover’s heart thoughtful and devout
with branch on branch, painting a vortex on tranquil tears

Brian Anketell is a Blue Mountains-based poet whose writing touches on philosophical and political issues often featuring natural or environmental imagery.

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Connie Barber

The Making of Complexity

Light from the sky, bright shreds
on the flinty bay, a moving filigree of scattered light,
overcast, variable.

Snow-cloud for somewhere else, white strips
across dark waters — fingers bright with sky-light
above dark water.

Cold wind across clean sand licks fallen boles and limbs
of a crumbling shore inexorably held

Twists and whorls, hard wood’s grain polished by sea and sand,
smooth as soft skin is pearled by snow-light
on rippled water.

Sand will hold root and limb for seasons while the shore settles
to something like permanence
a false security

for its ti-tree and banksia, its singing, honey-frantic birds.
I hold white bone scoured clean after the cuttlefish’s one
breeding season and the shining, dark, spiralled egg-case of a shark
released from its rock crevice
empty of life
wonderfully made.

C.M.B. has been a member of the Poets Union since it was all one once, and has been published widely here and overseas. Four Collections published, the last , Between Headlands, by Five Islands Press. Latest local publication in Motherlode and Southerly.

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Margaret Bradstock

Recherche Bay

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Thoreau

When Aborigines watched
Abel Tasman beating up the coast
(overhangs of cliffs

their camping spots), the great eucalypts,
sclerophyll forests, were already old.
Green is the colour of renewal,

of wild woodland and cultivated garden,
amber the fossilised resin
like tears, or blood on a scimitar’s curve,

the nets and traps of war.
If no-one is there can you still
hear the forests screaming?

Bulldozed out of history,
the gestures of reconciliation
become sites of mourning,

incendiaries dropped from a helicopter
our defeat, the blackened
fern-covered boles.

Recherche Bay, site of a historic garden cultivated by Felix Lahaie from d’Entrecasteaux’s Tasmanian expedition in 1792, became subject to a Government-approved road and logging project in 2005. Previously, forests north of South Cape Bay were devastated by logging and a ‘regeneration’ burn.

Margaret Bradstock has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being "How Like the Past" (Wagtail #87, Picaro Press, 2009). She is a co-editor of "Five Bells" for the Poets Union.

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Cathy Bray

Sustainable Industry Stutter

Suss industry
Stain industry
T’aen art industry.
Unsuss suss suss
Suss t’aenable industry.
5 am wake-up industry
Zola’s Germinal industry
Ivan Denisovich industry.
Unsuss suss suss
Suss t’aenable industry.
Wild-poet farming
Sonnet breeding lots
And mating pens.
Unsuss suss suss
Suss t’aenable industry.
Populate the barricades poets
Run for your lives before a quango gets you
And never assume the position.
Unsuss suss suss
Suss t’aenable industry.

* A recent article in ArtsHub by Amelia Swan mentioned ‘the unenviable task of turning the world of poetry into a sustainable industry’.

Cathy Bray is completing a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney in poetry and script writing . She is the Administrative Manager for the Poets Union.

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Colleen Z Burke

Whales and haikus

It’s difficult
to squeeze
the ‘scientific’
slaughter
of whales
into the
minimalist
structure
of a Japanese
haiku

“Whales and haikus” has previously been published in Go Down Swinging 2008.

Colleen Z Burke is a Sydney based poet. Her tenth, and most recent, poetry book is Fermenting.

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John Carey

A Warming Sonnet

The tropics are hopping mad and heading South.
At the Castle Cove Country Club, the Senior Pairs
hose down their sticky five-irons after a round
of cane-toad golf. At Riverview, the twilight air
hums with the tune of the Ross River Fever Blues.
In the undergrowth by the line at Artarmon Station,
brush-turkeys scratch and pick through our district views.
Queensland is the uncontested State of the Nation
and origin of most of the new species. Cockroaches
are getting bigger and bolder. The bats are bulking up
from a high-protein diet and their voices have broken.
Hobart is the new venue for the Melbourne Cup.
Even South of the border, the coastline has rusted
and all the hinterland has self-combusted.

John Carey is an ex-teacher of French and Latin and a sometime actor. His latest collection is "The Old Humanists" ( Puncher & Wattmann 2008).

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Jane Carnegie

Fish Perspective

My silvery iridescence
Twisting and turning
Mouth opening and closing
Darting to the surface
There’s a delicious morsel,
Oh God, I’m hooked

Jane Carnegie has a visual appetite and this is reflected in her poems – over decades she formed an Asian art library, listed on: www.janecarnegie.com

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MICHAEL CUNLIFFE

NEW HEROES

Archaic trees strain on a breeze,
Flows, flows through overgrown gullies,
Neglected by suburban housing estates
Where once tall and proud cane fields
Forged long and hard – as far as eyes could see –
The sweet fruits of new land explorers
Roaming where once, for millennia untold
Eucalypts stroked ancient breezes, and spoke,
Words sodden with the whisper of yesterday –
Secret echoes – mythic heroes grown – seed now rooted in bland soil
Of suburban gardens, part-wilted, shade-clothed,
Choked by concrete paths, bitumen streets
Directing cyclists, walkers, joggers, stragglers
On an expedition woven through assiduous sprawl
No machete-wielding explorer of the new lands
Could hack through – much less discover pools of clean drinking-water,
Now packaged in over-priced clear plastic bottles,
Stuffed and chilled in fridges
Alongside rows and rows of fizzy sugar-drinks.
Jangly-pocketed children lined with coins,
Denizens hunting rows and rows of new product-lines
For an enthralling new sugar-hit.
They cycle home, break-necked around corners
Oblivious of oncoming traffic, weaving the paths,
Dodging the joggers – the new heroes
Of tamed lands, heads filled with heroic deeds
Performed with leathery, pumped bladders.
The new whispers carried on ancient breezes,
Through branches of archaic, cornered wilderness
Are lit in bright neon and coloured plastic,
Emblazoned on retailers windows,
Across glossy covers on magazine shelves –
Breakage replaced, not repaired.
But as 10 year-old Madison County drops her game-console,
Darts outside, through the gate,
And clambers up the old tree at the estate’s edge,
The branches bend and lean and groan
Like Grandma in her rocker as a smirk escapes,
And new whispers fall upon that ancient breeze.

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Valerie Derry

Heart-seed

To a child, exile can be
a curious thing; being sent
to a mountain hide-away
with only Nature for company,
means even bush by day
becomes a surreal world.

Stars at night hang lower
in mountain air, and the sun
seems to rise and rampage
through the opaque glass flowers
in your window-cage
that you must try to slip through.

Soft city feet are daunted
by damp, earth-smelling trails
that you must follow, blind,
into green darkness, haunted
by lyrebirds - and then find
you have lost sight of the sun.

In this fortress of tree gods,
the giants are all petrified,
but you must not disturb them,
or their prehistoric pods
will erupt with green phlegm,
and baptise you into earth.

On your way back to the real world,
what have you gathered unseen?
When you are back in the city,
will the heart still have it furled
deep as the soul of a dream
until the next time of exile?

Valerie Derry teaches high school English. Her first published poem was in an anthology called Places of the Heart. She would like to see more resonance of green in the city.

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Rae Desmond Jones

Letter to Denmark

It is spring in the South, &
Purple flowers spatter the horizon,
Breathing out their dense syrup of light & life.

Things look not so different
Though we’re upside down, star gazing
From the fragile venerable earth.

It smells rich & soft, as though we could
Drop back into the fat cloacal mush
From which we writhed
(& thought we rose)

A few seconds ago, in the time
It took the eternal clock to factor the passage of light
Through matter, into consciousness.

Sitting in this most ancient garden I contemplate
The pregnant predestined chemistry

That made possible our vulgar growth:
Millions of us, wriggling & squirming,
Worms eating into the carcass

Of this tiny ball of mud & fire
That has sustained us, despite the chance
That some great lump of jagged rock could
Flick us with nonchalant indifference,

Knocking us sideways into some turbulent emptiness
A few million light years away.

Island Press published Rae Desmond Jones’ fifth book of poetry in 2008. It was his first book of poetry for more than twenty years. The condition of the world concerns him, and he has been writing prolifically around the subject recently.

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Kevin Gillam

between two trees

ache of sky where a troubles hand
scribbles in white crayon

a spider’s quarter acre

stained glass of fable,
a god’s attempt at why

something modern, in sap perhaps,
or dew and angst, something forgotten

scent of wet soil,
seeds of ideas

the breeze and squeals of children and
rusted song of swing

slack canvas of unthinkings

book of ends of bark and the
unwritten blue

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Eve Gray

Tales & Trials of Tourist Trails

Watch out for cornflowers!
Scrap-rags of blue snagged
in barbed wire, fencing dusty corners
where roads bank around drying weed.

Swatches of sky are earthbound
blueing drought blown despair
seen there as a rallying point
flagging survivors. Incongruous

yet it was its place, always had been.
There, morning’s favours
jousted dust from reckless
chariots choked with tourists

gasping to see the country breathe
the clean air, graze on green
vistas, stretch eyes, sup up wines
and talk loudly of the silence.

Along Mount View the tourists
come and go not talking of Eliot’s
Angelo testing words like
Chambourcin and Verdelho;

Rolling them on their tongues
And spitting in the vintage dust
making a meal of bouquet
while cornflowers cede a fragile truce.

Eve Gray, long time writer & poet, lives on a wildlife reserve in the Hunter Valley and believes writers must save the planet.

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Len Green

The Earth Needs You

Reflect on this, reader, the earth now needs YOU,
Environment action is long over due.
Consumers should proffer a way mark of worth,
Their personal action and guide for the earth.
Let's get back to basics and ponder a while,
On how we have plundered our own domicile.

The ice caps are melting at both of the poles,
With greenhouse effect and the ozone zone holes,
The oceans are rising with indecent haste,
While waters are poisoned by dumped toxic waste.
The coast of Alaska is oozing with oil,
And life slips in silence from that mortal coil.
In Amazon forests they clear fell the trees,
To service their debt as World Bank mortgagees.

The Gods in their sadness look down in disgust,
At landscapes, once verdant, now mud if not dust,
And nature, relentless, as patient as Job,
Looks on as a wasteland envelopes the globe.
Still government bodies have shoulders to shrug,
The entrepreneurs are contented and smug,
So long as their profits keep surging ahead,
There's little concern for a world that is dead.

Would you step aside or lend progress your voice?
Respond, that the guides of the planet rejoice.
Put World preservation first, top of your list,
So Nature and Man may at least co-exist,
For YOU must agree on this brief overview,
That now more than ever your one earth needs YOU!

Len Green is a medical practitioner, still working in his 85th year. He has published 12 books verse in aid of deaf and blind children, and has been awarded an OAM for medicine and charity.

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Susan Hawthorne

armour

she dreams of making armour for the earth
a helmet to prevent the drillers from beginning
a breastplate so they cannot cut open her heart
greaves to stop the underground lines
breaking through to the watertable

it confounds her that anyone would want
to mine Liverpool Plains
to make the earth a corpse to strip
back the muscle layer by layer
to let light in under all that rich deep earth
to groom her for profit burn coal embers
in the asthmatic air the heat increasing
to burn away everything for the emptiness
of waterdrained lungdrained flatlands

let them eat coal not food.

Susan Hawthorne’s collections of eco-poetry are Unsettling the Land (2008) and Earth’s Breath. She has work in Year’s Best Poems in 2006, 2008, 2009.

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Glen Hooper

Washed Out

Rain sheets down, bleaching hills
to calico, grass to khaki drill,
while we travel well insulated.
Puddles form original potholes
for cars to narrowly avoid, while
coffee colour dams inch higher,
promising a harvest this year.

In the rear vision mirrors
we glimpse a woman running blindly
across the highway, on a bend,
to save a lyrebird who stands
mesmerized by gleaming oilslick.
We don’t stop to help the rescue,
or hear a crash, just drive on
wondering at a dead wombat which
flicks past our vision, blanketed
across its middle as if marked for rescue.
We pass two more, uncovered
on the side of the road, rainsoaked.

A mangled kangaroo waves a paw.

On the approach to our little town
white-washed buildings huddle cold
under a relentless skyful of clouds.
Skinny saplings bend in the rain.
Inside the café our plates are huge,
brimming with lentil soup and corn
fritters to warm us right through.
Window watching, a local shivers, saying
‘This must be what they call Greenhouse.’

Glen Hooper is a writer of poetry and short stories, and an apprentice photographer. She is a retired teacher of English and History, and writes HSC study guides for nisi.com.

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Mark Jackson

Greatest Story Ever Told

The earth bleeds its oily wounds
into the pockets of man,
evolved to rape and pillage
burn crystals out of sand.

The oceans scream their whale songs,
while the ice shelf drops its load.
Carved in bone the history of man,
the greatest story ever told.

Mark William Jackson is a Sydney based poet. For more information visit http://markwilliamjackson.com

A version of this poem appeared on the Vox Poetica "Today's Words" page (http://www.voxpoetica.com/todayswords.html) on 4th March 2010, and is archived in the Vox Poetica Poemblog (http://poemblog.voxpoetica.com/2010/03/05/greatest-story-ever-told.aspx).

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Noëlle Janaczewska

The thylacine as a children’s game

I am the thylacine,
a big mouth, a nocturnal hunter, a price on my stripy arse.
I am the mystery in the mirror,
the last light of evening lifting from the bush,
the shadow on the rock.
Now you see me—
now you don’t.

I’m Thylacinus,
gaping jaw, cameo appearance in Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Forget the tree of life,
pervasive change is the go, he said,
no species eternally fixed.
Now you see me—
now you don’t.

Down the centuries I padded
through forests of prehistoric fern and vast eucalypts,
dripping mist and story-shaped,
there’s no view of the island without me.
Imprint on glass, immediate as sugar;
we’ve all got our different hungers to satisfy.
Now you see me—
in that photograph:
Cage. Zoo. Hobart. September 1936.
Days hot, nights down close to freezing,
and sometime in the small cold hours of the 7th —
Bye-bye tiger.

In your Petri dishes I smell a circus,
optimists picking through science, pissing on truth,
go on, gather up your scraps of me,
put the landscape back around me.
A claw-scratch, a preconception;
everything contains some silence and some fiction.
Now you see me—
in degraded DNA:
Case. Museum. Sydney. May 1999.
Go deep into the dark, to a place with half a chance
to see me intact beyond mythology—
I am still tiger.

Noëlle Janaczewska writes plays, poetry, spoken word, libretti, essays and radio scripts across drama and non-fiction. Find out more at http://outlier-nj.blogspot.com and www.noellejanaczewska.com.

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SK Kelen

Understand

wild animals become divinely rare
their habitats wild homes are soft earth & tree
cannot flee before the bulldozer concrete
flame and smoke desert where only wheat
cows and crows grow where wild animals
and forests once — the garden remains
and domestic wildlife love that life above all
whatever shares the human cage—
the cat is all that’s left of the leopard
the snails who sip spiders’ milk
eat flowers they live as frogs once did
when it rains and just after—currawong’s flight
rained on — ooze & wattle’s blood — rainy sagacity
gracious eucalyptus casts its own light

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Anna Kerdijk-Nicholson

Eclogue

Last night we had dinner together,
the six of us, coming through the door
with bowls of food and bottles of
wine and beer. It's a large, warm
kitchen, the oldest part of the house
(built in 1847 and all wood) with
paintings on every piece of the walls
and even resting up against them.
Six new friends, young still, full of
laughter and questions, making
ourselves at home where others
had eaten for a century
and a half.

The kitchen rests
on stone piers, stone from
the valley sides exposed by river
flows during countless thousands
of years. The floor boards are
honey-brown with the lustre of living
and new polish and wide, cut from the first
bounty of cedar clearing.

It's still, now,
after the day's strong wind
which rocked the tree: round the roots
the ground rose and fell as if
spirits were pushing from below.
In my cottage, thrusting
through cracks, these same spirits
pushed up the carpet and moved
chairs, spirits I had thought
had been stilled a million
years ago, when the land was
formed, but now
as it shuddered in the gusts,
the cottage, propped on rocks,
not linked by any veins for sewer
or arteries for water
to the town, made of the stuff
of the landscape round it, seemed
to make ready to return
and be spread over the heaving spirit
land, thrown up by it to lie open
to decay --

as happened to the
first homestead, now one mossed wall
encroached upon by trees (no cedar
floors remain, all burnt, that clearing frenzy
brought to nothing) but still looking out
to dairy paddock and a lush imported
herd whose hooves irritate the turf
and groove out walkways at the river
bank. Cows turn their backs against
the dust and the kangaroos crop at
their pasture, thieves in their
own land, watched by the boggly
eyes of long-dead tractor shells.

This is a succulent land in English
terms, phosphate-fed and dammed:
luscious green, roving beef, mined from
arid, sour-gutted dirt -- this land would be
happier to send out scenic shows
of she-oak, fern and gum,
or sweaty strangler vines.
Ask any farmer. "Harsh" one said,
"hard yakker": but they cling on
to the merciless land, having been here
just a hundred and fifty years, but convinced
they will belong.

The bucking land calmed
in the late light, and for a while yet we seem
set to stay. Were the spirits assuaged by some man's
sweat, perhaps, who knows --
who knows how to ask?

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John Kuti

Touching Time

(Mt. Tomah Botanic Gardens)

‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’
(Charles Darwin)

Much more could be said
Of plants which reigned supreme
When dinosaurs walked the earth.
These Gondwana Forest trails, this Rainforest Walk
And the new Australian Woodland
Merely touch the circuit of Time.

Much could be said
About these circuitous paths not taken
But Time mattered not, at Mt. Tomah.
Autumn has undressed deciduous giants
The Bog Sage has seen better days
Roses look crestfallen.

The handsome sundial gives compass bearings
Pointing the way to Russia, The Baltic States, Alaska
Rare birds feed silently, like ghosts;
Quietly they feed
And Time ceases to matter
Its ungainliness whittled away, so casually.

The Chinese Tallow
Perversely parades in designs of orange and muted amber
Habiliments with a carpet to match.
Hours are erased in the pleasure of the moment.
Pandora Pandorama , lecherously lichen infiltrated
Leans indecorously, defying gravity
Its heavy trunk twisted like a madman’s distraught sculpture.

In a protected zone, only diversionary draughts
Seem to infiltrate quiet pathways.
Mt. Tomah gloats over an emerald kingdom.
Paths intersect , merge, swerve and are lost
But the Koi Carp swirl in martial synchrony
Clashing in orange, golden and pied hues
Disdainfully sinuous.

Here ,Time is no longer regimented;
For memories are allowed to form
A subtle backdrop; an understated refrain
In tiers of tireless green euphony.

I grew up in Burma, migrated to Australia and worked as a High School Teacher. I have spent the last three years writing both poetry and prose.

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Peter Ladwig

Placard

Old-growth inheritance,
our children’s right.
Pulped.
Reincarnated, as a cardboard placard
‘Save the Forest’
a nine-year old parades defiantly.

Pete Ladwig is a 40 yr old graduate and tradesman based in Canberra who writes poetry because he can’t sing.

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Harry Laing

estranged

it seems the marriage of water and earth
has come apart

I take it personally
like a child
punishing the dirt with my boot

and the rain that was printed inside me
like a parent’s voice I never thought
water and earth would part company

look at these pictures call them bones
the bridal rush of water
down a honeymoon creek

see how flushed the earth looks
back then

inseparable they were
flooding because they loved each other

what’s to stop them getting back together

I ask over and over

Harry Laing is a poet, comic performer and creative writing teacher. His second collection of poetry, Backbone is due out shortly. He lives near Braidwood.

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Martin Langford

The Silence of the Frogs

So many silences.

Wharves. Or the silence of caves.

The silence of big skies. Of forests.

Of sunlight on carpet.

The silence of frogs.

You hear it round Sydney:
wherever the soil has been smashed,
or the billabongs drained;
wherever insecticide’s crept, subtle tide,
into slicks where the pathogens bloom –
each distinct silence the shade of an absence –
a graph of what’s no longer there.
You can walk through a loose, sandstone talus –
wind in the she-oaks, the black cockatoos
crunching cones; the peace-field of crickets
a torus with you at its heart: you will hear,
if you stop and breathe slowly, the diffident hush
where the bright, red-crowned toadlet once croaked.
Walk out in paperbark swamps at Kurnell –
through a patter of drips, after rain –
while shrike-thrushes start, and then mynahs,
and planes boost their thrust – you will hear,
in that open-air cave, the perfect
and brief non-existence of shy Wallum froglets.
Put on some boots for the leaf-litter – adders
and browns: the absence of burrowing frogs,
in the sun’s empty air; the soundless vibrato
of bright green-thighed frogs; the fitful
but vanished staccato of stuttering frogs.

So many silences.

These are all new.

But they won’t remain this clear for long.

They won’t be so easy to hear
once this cohort of listeners is all silent too.

Martin Langford is a member of the Poets Union Committee. The Silence of the Frogs was published in The Human Project: New and Selected Poems, Puncher and Wattmann, 2009.

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Rose Lucas

Coming of the Rain

Contentment,
my old and tenacious friend,
is back again,
nudging at my calves like a comfortable cat,
heading me towards the chair by the fire –
from which vantage point I see how
happiness has indeed quietly overtaken me,
it has slipped past the barriers of busyness,
and the stale melancholia of the spirits,
and pooled around me like puddles
spilling over
after the long, dessicating
dry of summer drought –
joy like sweet steady rain soaking
into the gratefulness of soil,
the roots of trees and
grass –
look, they lift their heads,
listening –
their wet faces open to the sky.

Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and critic. She is also adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Monash University.

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Mark Mahemoff

Summer ice

Apparently it’s been here
for sixteen million years

but who knows, maybe twenty,
maybe ten more.

You imagine polar bears
so white and savage

clinginging to frozen rafts
and then gradually vanishing.

This long ride seems to be ending:
luxurious for some, tormented for most.

Finally we’re all reduced to passengers
on this titanic earth
sinking.

Mark Mahemoff is a Sydney based poet. His previous books are Views (Wild and Woolley), Near-Life Experience (Ginninderra Press) and Traps and Sanctuaries (Puncher and Wattmann). He works as an individual and couple counsellor and is a drummer and percussionist in various ongoing musical projects.

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Marc Marusic

No Place for Gardens

Anti-garden suburbs
brutal scars
blighting Sydney
monoliths
too big for their blocks
and their households
monuments
to conspicuous
aspiration
packed together
but each a private world
dreams built on credit
relaxed and comfortable
numbness
waspy monoculture
marries pseudo-Tuscan vogue.

No awnings, eaves nor shady trees
windows sealed, air con blasting
heat the planet
to cool the house
which has no sense of warmth
triple garage greets the world
no front porch life
no sound of crickets
earth’s energies paved over
greenery confined
to tiny beds
nature’s more abundant
in some inner-city locales.

Aussie backyards
retreat indoors
children supersize
to match the nest
and parents’ bloating egos.

No Place for Gardens was published in Australian Socialist Vol 15, No3, 2006.

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Louise McIvor

Flag

ignorant
of prior revolutions
an iris
drips violet
on the open soil.

---

Tim Metcalf

Environmental Science

I

The river fills
its sandy bed
so it doesn’t
dry right out.
The water flows
fast by here
because there is
a stony channel.
Here the stone
is channel-cut
because the river
runs fast here,
though it ‘runs’
in a way that’s
different to the
platypus.

II

The fish all wave
their bodies
to keep their
swimming muscles
powerful enough
to force the water
past their bodies
so that the
platypus
cannot get a
hold on them,
so that the
parasites too
cannot get a
hold on them,
then float down
to the sandy
river’s floor
where briefly
things live
so that they die,
so that things
that live on things
that die can live:
see the bluish
fairy half-ring
on the riverside
where the trees
flower to attract
the birds,
essential
when the insects
underneath
their bark itch?
The waterbirds
float by thanks
to special features
that overcome
the tendency
to sink, caused by
eating the fish.
The birds that are
attracted to the
flowers are friends
with the Treecreepers
who like the insects,
and all the birds trust
the Kookaburra,
perching,
over the water,
its beak shaped
like a boat
so that it
can sail through
the branches
and sink
into black strips
of snake flesh,
unseen unheard,
like the snake
breathing,
like young trees running
in the wind,
like water weed
bubbling
with a silent
flourish.

III

The first people
came by here
before anyone
else, maybe
they could hear
the breathing
of the snake.
They needed signs
like anyone else;
snake was food,
so their signs
were different
to today’s.
We see what
we need from
the animal.
Certainly
two friends
here to study
scientific
facts don’t need
our explanation.
He loves insects,
they die
under his heels;
detaching heads
from flowers,
she daydreams
generations;
his watch confirms
the sun is in
correct position;
they laugh to
the ticking womb.

IV

Out of envy
Pittosporum
splits its fruit:
the bush agape
with toy snake mouths
yellow tongued
wooden hinges
swallowing
red berries
in a clutch,
which does explain
the snaking
limbs on the
shrinking bush,
because competition,
in this case,
helps the bird
in its tiny nest
far out.
From the mouse’s
point of view
the snake’s mouth
forms a final
cushion, an
unfolding from a
black shell case,
an ivory
four poster
with nice red
pillows.

V
Imagining
their solar house
our two friends
feel they’re floating,
no explanation
needed here,
his hands
cling live leaves,
her wet skin
in the light,
but this is all,
only surface
tension.
The water
into which
colour dissolves
would halt
right here
at the stony lip,
but for the
invisible
gravity
that carries it
in buckets
to force
the waterfall.
The earth spins
to maintain
momentum,
and all
the splash needs
at the bottom
is bare rock
and some air.

Tim Metcalf has spent his life in rural Australia. He works in remote area emergency medicine. His sixth collection, out soon, is The Effective Butterfly.

---

Kathleen Morgan

Belonging to this Space

Going back in time, to Warrane, Sydney Cove,
standing with the Eora watching ships unload,
seeing the white man again stake claim,
to something not his, by changing its name.

Within a few days it was obvious to see,
Terra Nullius was false, the land wasn’t free.
Still Phillip had plans, a type of assimilation,
an exchange of learning, to be the foundation.

So he made Tubowgule the point of Bennelong,
no longer was heard the ceremonial song
of the water's edge, Smallpox took hold,
spreading through tribes like the common cold.

Slowly the fences spread over the land,
bush tucker locked away from native hands,
while friendly settlers offered warm bread,
laced it with poison to add to the dead.

The warriors engaged in an unwritten war,
Pemulwuy, Tedbury, countless others swore,
to fight for the life of their tribal land,
being exploited in a way they couldn’t understand.

The clearing of trees, the fouling of streams,
the desertion of wildlife, unfortunately weren’t dreams.
Buildings covered burial sites, middens crushed for lime,
the boar rings lost forever, all in such a short time.

Standing at Warrane, imagining pre-settlement days,
the respect and understanding for Mother Nature’s ways,
the connection to the land, the knowing of our place,
as one of many species, belonging to this space.

Kathleen Morgan is a Sydney born poet, literacy tutor and care worker, interested in history, the environment, spirituality and cultural heritage.

This is a revised version of the poem which first appeared in The Koori Mail, 16.06.2004, and in the National Indigenous Times, 4.8.2005.

---

S. A. M'ray

Red Cellophane

Not a greenie!
Not another bloody greenie!!
Don’t you dry tsunami me
pointin’ your Bono through the haze
It’s just a once in a lifetime dust storm
again in as many days.
Are my eyes, my nose deceiving
or is some god bloody bleeding
then pissing in the wind
around the globe and back again?
Brisbane Water looks as good a place as any to land –
Now give us a hand!
How many tonnes?
I’ll hold up a shovel, catch some topsoil,
water it in for the lawn.
-
Did you see the ocean?
Looked like a heady hair of the dog dawn.
Mean? Gimme a smoke –
I’m a median strip alight
Now, how ‘bout a drink to clear out that dirty water pipe.

Don’t try me! I’ll bet my corrugated iron lung
you’ll bring up Maralinga
You can have up to eerie, dearie
but leave that to the bald headed singa, will ya?

Sure it’s real! S’real as a nation of rangatangs
staking their claim on the earth
As festive as proddies with a casserole of the afterbirth
-
Well bless my coagulated dead heart
I’ve come up with a solution that’ll bring a stain to your cataracts –
We wouldn’t want to leave our country and western cousins
broke and ill, under the weather like me
How ‘bout we pump ‘em back a shitload and then some
of (it’s all good) coastal fertility.

S. A. M'ray is a performance poet who is rarely spotted in captivity. She performed almost regularly at the Harold Park Hotel in the late '80s and at a sprinkling of other art/writer events. Till recently it was believed that she was extinct. Ms M'ray currently performs at open mic events and at Brackets and Jam on the Central Coast. She will be performing at the Folk in Broke Festival in November later this year.,/p>

---

Joyce Parkes

What

Shrubs in the garden
Wanda waters weekly

have died. What could
have caused the demise

of those Albany Woolly
bushes, its branches having

grown a lush yet gentle
fence greening a neighbour’s

inorganic garage, cars
& basket ball accoutrements?

Joyce Parkes has published in Overland, Linq, Stylus, foam-e, Cordite, and other journals and in The Best Australian Poetry 2005. ,/p>

---

Graham Rendoth

downpour

Heavy rains have arrived
washing down our citadel walls
and the Venturi-vulgar sidestreets
Fallow months dissolve –
the needles, the paper,
fallen flowers, dog turd,
our footprints, all wash away
Ambiguous scars in the bitumen
fill with distilled sediment
City water stocks had been low,
now they’re much improved

Graham Rendoth has been actively writing poetry since 2003. By profession he is a designer with interests in other visual arts – illustration, printmaking, painting, photography.

---

Margaret Ruckert

Noosa – Archival Footnotes

At first, she was little different
from any beach with a smile of sand
backside cooling in a blue lagoon
a street photographer hunting for angles
couldn’t decide between front or back
and took her, completely, on an aerial ride

and as she built a green reputation
for the laid-back life, treasure-by-treasure,
a forest of men were spruiking views
of her real-estate, how subdivision
would answer the timeless, urgent demand
for the shape of her pert supply curves

and after the lash of a hurricane’s tongue
they moved the river’s mouth for her
she, who collected grains of sand
like trading coins, like poker chips,
in the ultimate game of beach and brief
where sand is the currency of paradise.

Rich in rethinking archaic wisdom
its common mantra for sensible souls—
a city on sand is no man’s land
she proved this city was woman
standing up to threat in the prone position
breathing, rebirthing on a long shore-drift

and when jealousy swelled
like a loser’s headache, a rogue wave-trader
a tsunami of wave-traders
broke her banks, blocked her escape
and with her shore-line no longer sure
washed her away.

Margaret Owen Ruckert is a Sydney educator and poet, and former TAFE Science teacher. She is the author of You Deserve Dessert, available at www.omargo.com.au

---

Maryanne Sansom

Trees

Trees,
the amputees of Autumn
fling down their leaves in a defiant gesture
“There! Take that as well!”
then sulk and lick the wounds
that already taste of Winter.

Maryanne Sansom is a linguist and language teacher with a passion for words. Poetry has been a lifelong indulgence.

---

Jaime Shaw

Rain

Across the bay the forest
wears the dry cloak of mourning.

It’s the driest years since…
the driest fucking year since…

A lone Grey Heron stands
a statue in the shallows.

Quietly excepting short shrift
amongst the sea grass beds.

There was a pair once,
always fishing together.

I yawn and stretch
in the sting of early heat.

I haven’t heard the frogs
singing in the water tank

Since… since…
I don’t know when.

It all seems so pointless
without the sound of the rain.

The million beats of it
the drumming, lulling me to sleep.

But perhaps… perhaps…
it’s just a little hiccup…

---

Dorothy Simmons

Salinity

Spreadeagled land, saltbush scabbed, sprawls to the
edge of eyesight.
Vast vertiginous sky vaults from a vague horizon,
a distanced tidemark,
or timeline subversive, suggestive, gondwanaland seeping …
Sun flicks silicate off
the bleached sarcophagus of inland sea.
Off the windscreen, dropped from a sullen sky,
bounces a rain stone.
Another hits: again: again, strafing moulded panels,
stalling but not stopping
those mindless manic wipers.
Reeling from slingshot skyhoard, grit, twigs, gravel, tufted roots,
the car bores blindly on, on and on …
to apricotorangeadesupermartfax,
suburban strata, one-way streets,
laundromatautomatsauvignonblanc …
rear vision blind, blind and oblivious to
arthritic claws of hunkered saltbush
scratching after sap; salt encrusted air
shrinking scrotum scalp to calcified skull,
smearing sun shine across waxy knuckles
clamped around senility.

Dorothy Simmons is a writer and teacher with publications in YA fiction and literary journals. She is currently engaged in a PhD in Creative Writing.

---

John K Stuart

Composing compost

A moulding matted mass
of sweating vegetation,
dankly darkish brown
streaked with yellow,
settling, moistening,
grass and garden clippings,
fruit skins and food scraps
scattered through
warmly massing matter.
All sweetening sweetly
the fragrance of freshly cut grass,
in the fullness of a summer’s eve.

Disturbed,
a musty, dusty smell,
releasing the rich pungent odours
of heavy, steaming, decay.
Larvae lying in layers layering,
creepy crawlies worms worming,
living dying always turning,
seeds germinating, life terminating,
beneath and below layering through,
seething and breathing hidden from view.
Inner cycles patterning places,
insects birds people races,
all from the primeval slime,
all God’s creatures, all divine.

On top and around,
dragon lizards,
a family extending from past never ending,
myths and magic, freshly at play,
primitive forms basking, everlasting,
posing, poised.
A sudden movement, striking prey,
stillness returning,
digesting time,
heads turning sharply,
starkly present, proudly eternal.

No!
Fight or flee or no longer be,
the brown snake coiling, striking,
a lizard caught, choking,
the snake swallowing, slowly,
living death, dying, expiring.
Then, to the rescue, right on cue,
a homo sapien, thanking you.
Thumping, thumping, a branch bashing,
thumping, thumping, a snake thrashing,
disgorging lizard for survival,
invoking instincts that are primal,
self preservation, jungle’s law
in chaos theory, all is all,
as Paradise sweetens after the Fall,
with Eve in her garden mothering, more.

Meanwhile, up above,
watching and waiting in the nearby tree,
the crow with one wing
who couldn't fly,
feeding on compost provided by,
our fairy godmother of forgotten dreams,
nature’s saviour, if you please,
saving the weak, supporting the mild,
an all consuming love of child.
Now,
protecting the crow on death row,
from jealous comrades, more in tow,
with sticks and stones
flung at wings and bones,
battles forming, hurts and groans.

Then a duet,
the crow that couldn't fly
and the crow with one eye,
forming a partnership in that compost tree,
helping each other as need be,
from the marauding masses,
helter smelter,
basic comforts, food and shelter,
settling down over time,
in nature’s instincts the sublime,
for in the duet and the song they sung,
was another beginning beginning begun.

What next?
Well, stone the crows,
anything goes.
With my inner eye, now I spy
in the crow that could not fly,
there was a princess who became a queen,
with her one-eyed prince in the evergreen,
and at last reports they were seen,
nestling softly, peacefully playing,
richly abundant,
with lots of little crows
circling, circling, calling,
a symmetry of circles, carouselling,
ever-widening, gracefully,
heavenly harmony,
crows, calling,
in cycling circles so to find,
a life of purity, truth,
and peace of mind.

John Stuart, English teacher and writer from the Far North Coast, has been working at Xiamen University for several years, and is currently living in Hong Kong.

---

Immanuel Suttner

The Swiss Hotel, Bondi Beach

Crowds
Noise
Alcohol
large screens: horses egged on with whips
glassy suffering tottering people
trying to feel
trying to forget
trying to feel
"Music": duf duf duf
fried dead animal
chew. poo. chew.poo.
forget forget

out near Tamarama
some dolphins cavorting in the waves

Immanuel Suttner has long desired to lead a balanced life. He has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

---

Bill Tibben

(australian white) ibis

we are wiradjuri
of the dreamtime
before even the sacred ibis
who scribed pyramids with thoth
rummaged for serpent’s eggs
slept entombed with pharoahs
we are wiradjuri dreamtime

but we had to learn to live with cattle
waiting for rains that lessened year by year
numbers dwindling as hatchings failed
watching the wetlands under us dry to dust
the great season-cycle gone awry broken
what will we eat when the water is all gone
we could try to learn to live on coal

country people drifted east a century
made obsolete by diesel and machines
we had to follow them eventually
we flocked to the urban diaspora
with plovers pelicans and swans
grubbed a living from suburban parks
and the wasteful dumps of gluttony

flying over the rooftop plains
resting along street lights
unwelcome immigrants they call us
noisy dirty driving away locals
overcrowding spreading disease
we rest on dead tree street lights
we should have learned to live on coal

Bill was born in Holland and came to Australia in 1954. Now retired from a worklifetime in the NSW Public Service, Bill is pursuing personal and community interests - one of which is active involvement in ParraCAN (Parramatta Climate Action Network). He has published three books of poetry - two with Kardoorair (Near Myths - 1986, The Fascination of What's Simple - 2005) and one with Pie 'n Pps Press (The Conscious Moment - 1995).

---

Louise Wakeling

“O the wild charge they made!”
The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Lord Tennyson

1.

Warren (not his real name)
un-reconstructed anthropogenic
global warming sceptic of the attribution kind
plugged into www.climatesceptics.com.au
one of a ‘dad’s army’ of retired engineers
disgruntled captains of industry
(greenies to the left of him, greenies
to the right of him,
while “all the world wondered”)

he won’t have a bar of melting ice-caps
temperature spikes entirely within the range
of natural variability declining Arctic sea ice
or warming above the oceans
the polar bears are just fine
bats away the retreat of glaciers
like a pesky circle of fruit-flies
all part of the natural cycle

only, here’s the sky, a swathe of grey,
and it’s beginning to spit rain, this sound
louder than the noise of the de-mister.
Those Chinese dragon-clouds unfurl and threaten
the road winds and unwinds on a long spool
to the sea and I wonder how much CO2
I’m emitting now how big my carbon footprint is –
city-wide I’d say toes splayed and reaching
the coast, heel crushing the foothills of the mountains

meanwhile Warren warms to his theme
flashing his sabre one last time the climate’s
always changing man’s influence on nature is

a

drop

in

the

ocean

2.

one morning we wake to red September,
a Bladerunner sunrise red sky in the morning
like a blood-mist blindfold over the eyes
shepherds’ warning bathed in its eerie glow
it’s like we’re trapped in a sepia photograph
of our ancestors half the central desert
banked up against the window-sill dust
crowding the lungs like fans mobbing a celebrity
is it surprising we take shallow breaths
all day, dismayed, while the world wonders,
trying to second-guess what the earth is saying?

Louise Wakeling is a Sydney poet and teacher whose third collection, Paragliding in a War-Zone, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2008.

---

Les Wicks

Burnt Rubber at the Dead Zone

Elena has a new art, her brushes
this silver Kawasaki Big Ninja, ZZR-1100,
plus a radiation detector.

Girl of speed and silence,
technology beyond fingers, a stretched drum-skin of
void and straw where the
Monkey Law of Curiosity is written in nettles.

She rides through Chernobyl taking photos –
the Luminous Law of Poke.
Snow promises “reconciliation”.

A few declining shards of occupation, even tour guides.
But visitors cannot stay –
canned by quiet, the innate dissonance
of human clutter without the tribe…
well-fed eyes skitter,
shoulder muscles clench beside placards
for the 1986 Mayday Parade
Party of Lenin leads us to the Triumph of Communism.
Magazines unread, Fish and Hunt.
Kindergarten trips are postponed
for 30 generations.

"Chernobyl" means wormwood and
is an iridescent palette. This woman passes
corroded nests of tanks, Sikorski bones. My own
daughter was born that week,
this alp of news and a slow, implacable
gyre of contractions as we watched
Nightmare on Elm St, then Cheers.

A hoar of antiquity in the toss of their manes
Prejevalsky Horses shave grasslands,
this new age of life -
roses go the way
of any managed thing.
A patch of armistice as
confident wolves ignore the scent of dead farmyards.
Wild boar multiply, move in to simple wooden huts that
drink radiation but refuse to desert
their concord of shelter.

The Ferris ("Devil's") Wheel will not turn.
Washing, 20 years untouched, still on the line.
Vovik + Tanya = love (maybe still/
600 miles away and them nervously with new children
waiting for the taint).

Elena reassures us
that bitumen protects,
doses at their lowest in the centre of roads.
No one is surprised by this,
enduring haven of we beasts that ate.
Is this the last human ecology?
Roars of our engines, the septic gasp.
Opal eyes peering from tarmacadam coats.

“And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." (Rev. 8:10, 11)

“Burnt Rubber at the Dead Zone” was first published in The Ambrosaiacs, Les Wicks’ eighth book of poetry (Island, 2009).

Les Wicks conducts workshops across Australia & is still smiling often. He runs Meuse Press which focuses on outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river, his latest publication being “From this Broken Hill”.
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

---

Irene Wilkie

escape from stones

cicadas drill a summer beat
celebrate escape from stones
and unlit earth

cicadas drum in unison
bombard the air
then stop as one

stun with silence –
its shock
of absence

undersongs filter in

a dry- leaf lizard skips
a beetle clicks
a bullfrog barks

hawk wings clap
above the sigh
of eucalypts

As you sketch your pencil slows
your chair scrapes you come to hear
cicadas throb begin again
wrap us deep in their ringing –

suddenly a thorax drops
bodiless
wings still trying

crescendos swell
for one small death –

stillness again
offers small sounds
of you of me
your voice my voice
your breathing mine

there are no others

“escape from stones” appeared in an earlier form in Love and Galactic Spiders (Ginninderra Press 2005). Irene Wilkie's first motivation to write poetry was the beauty of her local area. Its affect on her and other poets she knows is always an astonishing wonder.

---

Ron Wilkins

day by night

when
the day becomes the night
and we are drawn
to drift in dreams that journey us
through endless rooms and corridors
where we engage in puzzling ways
with people mostly known
but strangely out of place

soft-footed ones
emerge from dark of day
into the light of night
wrinkle noses sniff the air
recommence nocturnal ways

from its daytime arbour
a molluscan fleet sails forth
on undulations of the soil
to distant lands
where quivering lettuces submit
to masticating lip

tree spiders spread
their silken dinner-cloths
and on the ground
upon stiletto heels
philandering funnelwebs alas
moon-struck by love without
reflecting on the moon’s reflection
slip into the pool and drown

here and there a coleopteran
scuttles in the shadows
mosquitoes sing their anti-lullaby
moths gyrate round moonbeam poles
fat caterpillars trim the green
and the worm turns
while high above bats skim the trees
and quarrel over honey blossoms

a gentle fragrance on the breeze
of pheromones and food
activates olfactory sensation
ensures essential interaction
culminating in the grandest feasts
of various delicious living beasts
and all the while
we wander in our dreams
among the echoes of the past
the portents of the future
and as night becomes the day for us
the day becomes their night
and one is led to wonder if
these denizens of dark
possess some sleepy other world
in which they also drift and dream

---

Graham Wood

Crows in the City

Crows in the city carck their carrion cries
over traffic at midday. What was that?
A crow? Shit! Stone the bastards!
They’ve invaded the metropolis
scavenging for food. Why are they here,
where they’ve never been before?
Drought? El nino? Global warming?
Are they presagers of doom? Harbingers
of the hot dry times to come?

I have them at home now too,
in my little patch of suburban bush,
where they lord it over my back terrace
even when I’m there - game as accomplished criminals,
black as boot-polish, devilishly clever.
They upend pot-plants, uproot plant tags,
move seashells and white pebbles around,
dunk pieces of bread in bird-bath water,
and leave me with a ratty assortment
of old chop-bones picked clean,
shards of plastic and coloured glass,
useless trinkets picked up elsewhere.

In the city, I hear them from my office desk
over the conversation in progress,
over the traffic in the street below.
The corbies of Bridge Street
sqwaarck the afternoon away,
announce their Hitchcockian presence
in long staccato warnings
that echo through the streets.

Graham Wood lives in Sydney and is a member of the Poets Union. He has published poems in Westerly, Five Bells, fourW, The Mozzie and other publications.