The Poem of the Month for October 2025, selected by 2025 Anthology editors Val Braendler and Ben Adams, is Penguin Blood by Kathryn von Bergen. The commended poems are Mathematician’s Oath to the Infinite by Claudia Raddatz, Half Light by Fred Willet and Pebble Hunt at Aldinga Beach by Martha Landman.
Penguin Blood
Kathryn von Bergen
Now
late in my life,
a discovery
resonant with wonder,
recalibrating my sense of self:
1940 –
University of Adelaide
Kerr, Pfeiffer, Dutton, Harris
poets avant-garde
birthing Angry Penguins
from ashes of Phoenix –
the journal, a movement
in those heady days
of Modernism.
Paul Gotthilf Pfeiffer
eldest of the four,
acclaimed scholar, linguist
Master of Arts rising star,
resident tutor of Thiele et al.,
there, stamping his mark
on history.
But the drums of war were sounding
for this gentle young man
from a Rocky Plain farm
sewing wheat bags in harvest’s rush –
RAAF enticing him
to the far side of the world.
Prussian ancestors,
a Pfeiffer family of seven
from village of Rakau,
salvation from oppression found
aboard Hahn’s good ship Zebra.
How then, a century on,
did this German-Australian
find himself back in that
hemisphere once forsaken,
hunting Atlantic U-Boats,
crewing a thundering
Sunderland sea plane
with call sign Z-Zebra?
Navigator, bomb-dropper,
spotting spluttering survivors
heritage of his
flailing below in icy waters,
throat-spewed from gaping maw
of shattered submarine –
censured later, was he, for
hurling in vain their life rafts down –
hypothermic other mothers’ sons
sacrificed to the megalomania
of a Fuhrer.
Flying Officer Paul
was soon to follow,
interred in Stonefall at far remove
bare months shy of armistice,
the instructor, ever the educator,
fatally injured
just 28.
Cherished child ninth
with a beloved in London –
who would he have been
had he lived?
First cousin of Leonard Pfeiffer,
strangers, boys to men
on wagon-distant farms,
Len serving too – in PNG
but surviving
to raise a five-child family
with one, a daughter
they named Kathryn.
Paul, can you hear me?
How could I not
have known your story
until now, in 2025?
I will pen poems for you
my cousin,
to honour the Penguin blood
in our veins.
And I will be angry
80 years on,
at the sheer absurdity of it all –
our world still power-driven,
conflict-riven,
young lives ever pawns
on the chessboard
of oppressors.
As in your poem, ‘At the Window’
I now stand, watching
‘the last dismembered star
flung into space’ –
flawless poetry forever yours,
a legacy left for posterity
in ink and blood.
Stonefall: RAF Cemetery, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England.
‘At the Window’: from Paul Pfeiffer, Hymeneal to a Star, The Adelaide University Arts Association, Adelaide, South Australia, 1942.
Mathematician’s Oath to the Infinite
Claudia Raddatz
I swear by infinity that mathematics is not a dead dogma, but a living
river of thought.
I swear that every number carries within it the spark of eternity and that
every proof is a bridge between the human mind and the mystery of the
cosmos.
I swear to remember that behind every symbol there is a story, a curious
mind, a culture, a yearning to understand the eternal.
I promise that zero will not be emptiness, but origin; the one will not be
solitude, but beginning; that the primes are secret voices of creation.
I declare that equations are not chains, but wings; that axioms are not
prisons, but seeds; that geometry does not draw walls, but windows
to the impossible.
I swear to teach that infinity is not a wall, but a horizon; that uncertainty
is not a weakness but a door; and that a proof is not the end of the
road, but the beginning of a new question.
I swear that algebra shall not become a tyranny of symbols, but a song
of relations.
That calculus will not be an exploitation of the infinite, but a
contemplation of its pulse.
That statistics shall not serve the deception of power, but the clarity of
truth.
I promise that not to subjugate the language of mathematics will be used to liberate and
not to subjugate; to reveal and not to conceal; to unite and not to divide.
With this oath, I declare that mathematics belongs to the people, to the
collective imagination, and not to any throne, market or army.
I affirm that mathematics is a common good, like water and air, and that
no one can appropriate its light.
Half Light
Fred Willet
There in the half light just before dawn
On the eve of battle, the coming storm
He stands out alone on the grey rampart
Relaxed at peace now battle lines are drawn
How many men will arise at his call
Storm from their trenches how many will fall
They will all charge forth in heroic waves
Leap from their trenches straight into their graves
The man on the ramparts knows this. His call
Will end with the loss of so many men’s lives
The battle will signal the worst job of all
Writing letters of loss to all of their wives
‘Your husband died bravely,’ the letters all said
It can’t hide the fact that now they’re all dead
Pebble Hunt at Aldinga Beach
Martha Landman
The ocean coughs up nature’s gems, pebbles
in our palms: bird eggs in grey, blue and white,
a head like Caesar’s, two brown seals kissing,
a child’s foot lost in sand as if walking
from the shipwreck of the Star of Greece,
where past and future collide in the ocean—
a vast lagoon today. Unimaginable
the mountainous waves that crushed
the wheat-laden ship then. At the pylon-relics
of a jetty we take refuge from the sun,
rest in a fisherman-crafted cave below
yellow cliffs, contemplate the progressive
abrasion of stone, life’s fragility,
our fragility held in nature’s palms.