Poem of the month

Each month the two FSP editors select a poem, from those read throughout that month, as the poem of the month. A laminated copy of the poem is awarded to the poet at the next FSP City meeting. This is peer recognition of a poem of high quality.

November Poem of the Month: Lindy Warrell

The Tourist by Lindy Warrell

It's not my country… 
          this jeweled isle of caparisoned elephants
           and twirling dancers chanting and
            torch throwing in dazzling costumes 
             over pure white cloth 
              to a million torches and drums
               thrumming in veneration.
                                    Buddhist spectacle surround sound.
 
It's not my country…
          where obeisance to gods
           and vows are performed
            in coconut frond palaces
             woven for the divine when
              a priest trans vests to dance
               in silken sari and trance. He is the Goddess.
                                     Cries of joy and rupees adorn Her sacred hem.
 
It's not my country…
          where drunken tourists
           lounge near-naked in hotel luxury
            and palm-lined beaches
             wander unheeding in
              paddy fields people call home
               where buffalo graze and children play.
… Click for more

September Poem of the Month by Rob Ferris

Guerillas by Rob Ferris

Still camouflaged from the air
the guerrillas are dead in a glade.
Birds and conservative creatures
diminish them.
In cocoons of dappled cloth
their bodies pupate backwards
while images crawl away
alive on a cameraman’s back.

In the forest
they fade by fragmentation
their flesh maintaining 
sun drenched birds
rehearsing siren 
trumpet calls:
the music of
historical necessity
that placed them
in this shade.

Ideas swarm and die like bees,
steel wobbles and rushes
through leaves.
Fruit of revolutionary change
falls and dries
in the sun.
In villages, men’s mothers
lie awake
and make them brothers.

October Poem of the Month by Elaine Barker

IN SUMMER’S HEAT by Elaine Barker

Blue Mountains, NSW

Who has taken up this azure veil,
casting it like a mantle
to float silently into the valleys,
to tangle with trees,
to drift over rugged peaks and cliffs,
escarpments and chasms
and then away, away into the distance
as far as the eye can see?
As the vivid mist rises, 
the colour of lapis lazuli,
its earthy opulence carries
the essence of the eucalypt.  
And who, enveloped in summer’s heat,
savouring the heady aroma 
and gazing over these mountains
has not stood, caught in awe,
and wondered at this infinite mystery?

December Poem of the Month

The Poem of the Month for December is The Crow by Tess Driver. The Commended Poem is Fleas by Suzanne Verrall. Congratulations to both of them, and to all the poets who have had poems selected in 2018. 

The Crow by Tess Driver

Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls:
Crackling heat, a keening call of birds
As wild-eyed stallions crush against their stalls.

Her Monday wash hangs smouldering, then falls,
The cats run howling, roasting in their fur,
Flames lash the sizzling bones of molten walls.

The wind is singing fiercely as it mauls
And guzzling flames spew out their greedy words.… Click for more

November Poem of the Month

The November Poem of the Month is Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis and the Commended Poem is Ice-shelf by Jules Leigh Koch.

Sticky Notes by Maria Vouis

              Signs everywhere,
of your studies, 
                           like a litter trail 
                                           of sticky notes
                                                          bookmarking your passage.
 
                  Thumbprint punctuation 
                                                                     on wrists’ transparent skin,
ink-stains between clavicles,
                                                    fluoro highlights doodled on breast-cleft roads, 
                   sweat runnels blurring 
                                                                     intertextual references,
a slurry of metaphors 
                                                                      scribbled into my navel,
                                        cyanotypes where your lips loitered,
a palmist’s prophesy printed on a bare buttock,
                                                                      thighs propped open like chapters 
                                                                                                                               at the plot’s peak,
                                          your back-catalogue of luminous lines
                                          indexed and bound between my hip bones,
your name graffitied, 
                                                       with possessive apostrophe behind my knees,
                                    
and a tiny tick-tack pulse 
                                                                      on my throat
                             typed by your tongue.                                        
… Click for more

September Poem of the Month

September’s Poem of the Month is The Right Dog by Steve Evans. Commended poems are A Plague of Ologists by Peter J Meech and Big Red, Birdsville by Jacqui Merckenschlager. 

The Right Dog by Steve Evans

There’s craft in this, a gift,
An art to choosing
The right dog
In the pound.
My daughter can’t decide.
It’s finally the promised day but
It’s too much for her.

There’s music in them all,
Keen as they dance from paw to paw—
Except one dog that calmly raises its nose.
Who are you, my daughter asks?
That slow gaze returning says:
I am half of our future days.… Click for more

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