All Entries in the "Poetry" Category

7. Snapshot: Backyard Dandenongs, Vic Australia – Jennifer Compton

Local Knowledge
Our fire siren can sound at any time and it gets all the dogs in the village barking.
If you can hear the siren down in Upper Ferntree Gully as well then it may be serious.
The stretch of Burwood Highway down out of the Yarra Ranges is called [...]

Poem by Valerie Nunis (Singapore)

Mongrel
I used to be
brown, with a tinge of yellow
and could never quite colour in the right shade of my skin,
skin dusted with hair that was
brown and black on my head,
with a tongue claimed by two civilisations,
though my heart could call neither its own.
Roots snarled over questions of origin, and what,
exactly, I was.
‘混血儿’ 1
is what a bus [...]

3 Poems by Raksha Mahtani

Elegy to the Ingratitudes

She roosts at home, braless, sagging,
picking at nails yellowed with tumeric
and caws at me to learn our native tongue.
Her language, rather,
one that has no word for thank you.
A language living in the nose,
one that crinkles up in disgust
at the Chinese boys I sometimes bring home
to help fix her faulty stove.
This apathatic [...]

A Bottle-Born Letter For Robben Island by Jan Erik Vold (Norway)

I TAKE A FELT PEN
and draw
an
Indian
on the canvas
of the sky. That is my
monument. That is the help
we’re looking
for. I put the sketch in an
envelope
and send it
to Robben Island.
EVEN IF I’VE FORGOTTEN
the zip
code. Even
if I’ve forgotten the bank
account. Even if I’ve forgotten
the social service
number, the
passport number, the bicycle
number. I send my letter in a bottle
to be [...]

MEKONG Paul Croucher

You remember
Ajahn
Chah on that
“still, flowing
water,” and
suddenly
you’re walking
from the football
ground to
the station
with
bare
attention
in the
cold
Melbourne
air.

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MOUNTAIN CLOUD, VALLEY STREAM Paul Croucher

Next thing, we’re climbing
Bogong, with the prayer
that we’ll clear
some air,
buy some time
for a song.
*
But we’re moth-ridden
with thoughts
brought up
from the past
and the starless city.
*
Like old clothes
in an old suitcase
we carry them.
Up the Staircase Spur
to a packed attic
of snowgums
of long ago.
*
And in the real morning
we come
up over Bogong’s
exposed hump.
Up into that
supernatural weather.
*
Swayed by crazy
winds
and the snow
laying down [...]

Reshma and the universe Marc Daniel Nair

The tear is the anticipation of the eye’s future
- Joseph Brodsky
You blew into me a garden wind
cracked the hard coating on my eyes
opened me up to sounds of bells,
tolling across Kerala backwaters,
of rolling stones, a giant’s frieze in Hampi,
the rush of London,
plumbers twisting pipes and arms
by the pool, plunging down money for nothing,
and the crush [...]

Notions of a lone backpacker Marc Daniel Nair

I imagined finding the original Bali,
untainted acres of padi, with children
chasing ducks across narrow mud banks.
The ache of continents behind me,
I saw myself stepping into light
that lifts you through rice terraces
twirling with parasols of saffron.
Instead, I’m brought to a bankrolled field,
amidst villas of the Viceroy, where tourists
wake on water-borne beds, having dreamt
of rice stalks peeking [...]

Oppositions Joel Toledo

The persistent
pairings of nature:
butterfly and moth,
all grace and flutter,
flame and death. Always
terror crosses over into
beauty, the tender
undersides of caterpillars.
Then wings. Tremor of color.
Great shakings of flowers
and from somewhere,
waft of burning candles.
Tell me, where do
they die, effervescent
and funereal,
where do they live?

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Those Days, Those Serpents Joel Toledo

.Surely
we are not built for simple death
and forgetting; someone carved
these letters and the names are spelled
with deep, defined strokes. So easy then,
careful, the moths are tracing shadow arcs
against the dull light before resting whole
on the wooden walls. We learn of it
…………………early on, how the eye
stings from their powdery feathers,
how we should avoid touching them.
And I [...]