Each month the current Anthology Editors select a Poem of the Month, chosen from those submitted at the FSP Open Mic events.
Here are the Poems of the Month for 2019, selected by Valerie Volk and Nigel Ford.
FEBRUARY: Not Knowing by Belinda Broughton
MARCH: Burning River by Steve Evans
MAY: Ghost Gum by Jules Leigh Koch
JUNE: Birch Broom by Elaine Barker
JULY: My Autumn by Pat Lee
AUGUST: The Break by David Cookson
SEPTEMBER: Guerillas by Rob Ferris
OCTOBER: In Summer’s Heat by Elaine Barker
NOVEMBER: The Tourist by Lindy Warrell
DECEMBER: Bedroom in Arles by Louise Nicholas and Living with Mr D by Judy Dally
Not Knowing Belinda Broughton (February)
In a hammock under a wide sky,
the sun has warmed my slow blood.
The trees above nod when I move.
A dandelion arrives, drifts,
ambles on the delicate breath of air
—this way, that, exits sky left.
I don’t know anything meaningful.
I know its Latin name, its method
of seed dispersion, what it looks like
under a microscope.
I know about osmosis, photosynthesis,
xylem, phloem, probability.
But I don’t know anything really,
not in this moment of the world,
cradled in the warmth of spring sunshine,
the dandelion afloat on its way somewhere,
the sky painted very high up with long filaments
of cloud and a breeze getting up in the branches.
I’m given over, up,
and I don’t know
what I don’t know.
The Burning River Steve Evans (March)
On my last New Year’s Eve in the town
after the parties all died down,
Cowley’s mob stole a petrol drum
to set the water alight
and where we had earlier swum
tipping our mouths back wide
in that soft confluence of river and summer rain
was a wild rag of blue flame
that I watched from the jetty,
the burning river a signal to the stars
and those about to leave this place,
but now my feet leave no prints on that soft shore,
the lights of town squint to a blur
and I sweep from here to anywhere
as easy as flicking stations
on the Falcon’s radio—
invisible.
I slide past the open shed at the corner mill.
The stacked sap-wet ends of new timber
are raw 45s with the years’ slow music in their rings.
Blonde stalagmites of dust lie under the bench
where Tom Wright lost a finger
to a second’s dreaming
and when asked how he did it,
showed them with another one.
At town’s edge
cattle like scattered handbags
still graze the hillside above Baxter’s dump
where heaped papers in constant migration
turn through summer air
and accidental sculptures of cast-out wire
lie tangled as my old homework excuses.
A broken pram on its side
is a billy-cart in waiting
and the gold and orange
of nasturtiums along the road
will work their mysteries of light
in morning’s glare.
I pass the paddock’s charred circle
where we jumped at Guy Fawkes’ crackers,
rattling ladders of red and green,
the strings of squibs thrashing underfoot,
and where the tang of soursobs in spring
was as bitter as old torch batteries
tested on the tongue,
now thistles’ cardboard crowns crowd along the fence,
and the flat ground has been graded into squares;
a dusty map for new houses
that are still a long time coming.
In Newland Road,
in that house with worn shutters,
I am nine years old,
sprawled across a soft-sprung bed
dreaming of the fastest bicycle in the world,
half-pedalling it already,
my mother by the kitchen radio
re-stitching the collars on my father’s shirts
and he two days away
on a sales round through
other towns just like this one.
At Pattersons’ place down our street,
the dog’s dish is an old hub-cap,
their side-gate’s an iron bedstead.
Their chooks in the doorless fridge out back
are tucked into crooning sleep
quieter than the Patterson twins
who snore on the cool of the veranda floor,
Mick Junior chasing sparrows
with a pinch of salt
can’t even catch them in his dreams.
Heather Timms.
Heather Timms.
What became of Heather Timms?
The newspaper said she left a note,
that she eloped at seventeen.
She fell into the dark.
I wondered about weddings
and missed her.
Her absence hung about us.
Her mother left town,
her father would not speak
though I knocked on her door for weeks.
The streets I ran
are quiet now in night’s held breath
but all of yesterday’s scraps revolve,
the brash colours and faces flashing their instant
like summer slide-shows in the garden,
images floating on a hung white sheet,
every time I step out
dreaming my old town.
Ghost Gum Jules Leigh Koch (May)
(Corymbia apparerinja)
amongst eucalypts you are a cult figure
painted by Albert Namatjira
and anthologised
in Aboriginal Dreaming
as the Tree of Knowledge
in 1891 before there were union halls
and street rallies
you were a gathering point
for striking shearers
seasonally you strip off
your bark corset
exposing your silvery skin
and wax-like texture
high heeled and sun hardened
you’re a juke-box
of native bird sounds
taller than a ship’s mast
yet you stay mostly unnoticed
in your arid landscapes
until night when
against a blackboard sky your trunk
is chalked in
Birch Broom Elaine Barker (June)
A broom was sweeping steadily back
and forth, toiling over those leaves amassing
in their thousands along the footpath
and gutters near The British Library.
Our eyes met. I smiled at him
and his wide brown face opened and shone.
‘I been working here all the week lady
and you’re the first person give me a smile.’
He set the broom straight, hands resting.
I felt a mixture of pleasure and shame.
I work with words, not leaves,
but can collect none
to match or to answer his simple truth.
I continued on my bookish way
and the street seemed desolate and long.
Over the years the broom
with its orderly rhythm returns
to my thoughts as it labours on.
And words like leaves keep mounting,
waiting for me to gather them.
My Autumn Pat Lee (July)
Autumn leaves fall and scatter
blown by a wind I cannot see.
I shuffle through them
piled along the path.
I try to catch one
as it eddies down —
just out of reach.
Words no longer come to me
gathering with ease
in harmonies of colour and sound
and when first written as notes
for something creative —
later on
they seem not to point in one direction
instead
my tiny-scratched-scribbles
tease —
hard to trace a meaning
hard to gather words together.
From me words fleet away
or drift and disappear,
autumn leaves —
just out of reach.
The Break David Cookson (August)
What’s to be said, it’s just rain again,
slanted spears assaulting garden paths.
What’s to be said; seen it all before —
how the land changes, darkens, becomes fecund:
ho-hum of prisms from road oil sinuous in drains.
What’s to be done; no point in going out;
have felt its sting on my face before
as it scours away myopia, sharpens lines;
a scent that dares poets to evoke.
What’s to be done, stay in with cold toes, TV,
for it’s only rain, just pearly worlds on leaves
naïve rhythms pecking on tin roofs.
But if prayers are ever answered,
the creek will come down like Byron’s Assyrian
purge drought’s detritus of reeds, death, plastic rags,
waterholes limpid again as the burden lifts
It’s only rain, at last; what’s more to say;
just rain.
Guerilla Rob Ferris (September)
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.
In Summer’s Heat Elaine Barker (October)
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?
The Tourist Lindy Warrell (November)
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.
Bedroom in Arles Louise Nicholas (December)
Vincent van Gogh, 1888
The bed is borrowed from fairytale: too hard,
too high for a golden-haired intruder in need of sleep.
But see how it matches the word – the head and foot-
boards of the b and d, the e of the mattress between.
How clean and cheerful the room appears.
How blue the walls, the doors. How the sun
squares its shoulders to each window pane
and daubs its yellow light on towel and chairs.
Can't you see him hanging his coat and hat
on the hooks, sweeping with a straw broom the bare
boards of the floor, arranging his hair brush, the basin
and jug, on the washstand beneath the little mirror?
He leans over the bed to straighten the paintings
on the wall, and now he’s ready with canvas
and oils in the primary colours of childhood,
to paint this place of inviolable rest.
For a time, his manic imagination is stilled
by straight edges, right angles and clean surfaces
where nothing casts a shadow…
A razor waits ready-stropped beside the blue jug.
Living with Mr D Judy Dally (December)
1.
At 2am
or 4 pm
or sometimes
10pm
just after
we go to bed
he gets up
to make breakfast.
He asks me
“Do you want breakfast?”
And I say “No
It’s too soon.”
It’s just too soon.
2.
For some reason
his feet
don’t tuck under the sheets
so
night after night
I lift his feet into the bed
spread the sheet over his legs
and tuck him in.
Like a baby.
3.
When we sit
in a group of four
there are sometimes
just
three of us.
4.
On those nights
when he isn’t sure
what time it is
what’s going on
who he is
(maybe
who I am)
I lie in the bed
with my back to him
and make him hold me.
I place his hands
on my skin.
Eventually
he settles.
Rests his head
against my back.
Breathes deep.
Sleeps.
5.
His family thinks
I’m a perfect carer.
They see me guiding him,
holding his hand.
They don’t see
the angry rants,
the frustration.
They don’t see
the empty bottles
in the wardrobe.
6. Our conversations
aren’t what they were.
His body
isn’t what it was.
Our memories
don’t always connect.
He is always
three steps behind me.
But I love him.
I still love him.