Margaret Fensom was born in London in 1943 and migrated to Adelaide by steamship in 1947. She is now widowed with two adult daughters and five grandchildren. She has completed a BA and an MA (Creative Writing) at the University of Adelaide.
Margaret lives in a cottage in Norwood. Her interests include public transport, solar and wind energy, the environment and social justice. She has published poems in Friendly Street Readers, the Friendly Street New Poets Series (Number 12, 2007 ‘Travelling’), and other anthologies, journals and magazines, and had three children’s stories told on television. She won equal first prize for her poems, Afterwards and Fireworks in the South Australian International Women’s Day Poetry Competition. Her short story, The Keeper of Lost Objects, was highly commended in the 1997 Judah Watten National Story Writing competition, and was subsequently broadcast on Radio Adelaide (5UV).
Her travel book, Trains, which contains some of her poems, was Beta published by L & R Hartley Publishers and is available as a CD Rom from www.lrhartley.com/fensom. In 2014, she published her poetry collection The Landscape of Dreams (Ginnindera Press).
Liberation
Every morning
Year upon year
I washed the dishes
Till one day
The dishes turned to leaves
And I fed them to my goat
From Friendly Street No. 16
Travel Journal
I have found birds
Hiding among the irises
The pale orange lilies
And blue leaves
Of my journal
Which hides arum lilies
White irises by river
Stone bridges over the Seine
Dreaming afternoons in boats
Pale lochs with mountain shadows
And the turquoise lake of Venice
But how much stranger
Beyond my imagination
Are the flowers which I have never seen
Birds hiding in dreams
From Friendly Street No. 24
Hot Rods and Tulle
Orange cars with white ribbons
Belching white smoke
Fog the road with their roars
Bell towers
Hazy in mist
Powdered bridesmaids
In lilac
Carry stiff bouquets
All the coloured wrappings
Of love and hope
Twist in cold winds
From Friendly Street No. 27: Blue