S.C. Flynn

THE COCONUT There had never been a coconut in our townuntil my sister ordered one from the shop.We waited months for it to arriveand almost drove Mr Baldini crazyasking for news of this round messengerfrom the outside world we’d never seen.When the coconut finally arrived,it was like a taste of the exotic,a cure for our… Continue reading More Poems of Australian Childhood

I have some items of poetry news to share. Firstly, I am very pleased to have been shortlisted for the Allingham Poetry Prize. The final results will be announced next month, so we shall see what happens. Two of my recent poetry acceptances have some special sentimental value. My family originally came from County Roscommon… Continue reading News

The Continent of Insects Australia is really theirs:for hundreds of millions of years they have fought each otherand the brutal landscapein primordial arms racesthat developed specialised workers,warriors with pincers and shieldingand sophisticated social structures.Wars and alliances between themstill come and go, like their cities,while elsewhere humans in parallelare living out their noisy moment. Numbat Our journey… Continue reading Poems of Australian Childhood

To say just what you feel is never easy. A woman’s clothes lying by her feet in a pile might be the foam from which a goddess is born or the frothy breakers of a sea that might rush in and overwhelm us. We can think that our acts are not our own and rather… Continue reading Adultery

In the endless metropolitan grey, the weekend flashes by between two darknesses. Many wander lost in the pause: swimming, lying on the beach or flying, giving their bodies back for a moment to the elements from which they were made, while others die, going back to them for good; time has washed against them like… Continue reading another bright sunday

PASSENGERS ON THE ICEBERG Australian Antarctic Territory, midsummer Then in a patch of clearer ice I see him; a bearded man with an outstretched hand. I want to dig him out and ask him who he was, but then he’s gone and the ice is milky. Still, we’ve got months to go until the night… Continue reading a journey poem

SEVENTH VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS Machu Picchu, Peru, 1400 AD The world of the gods is yours, Chakana, yours and the condor’s. Even the mountains can’t lift me out of the puma’s paw; up here where the air is just the sigh of a dream I’m as far from you as if I crawled… Continue reading a star poem

AGAIN MIDNIGHT Through a thousand espresso mornings I’ve waited for life to make sense of a heap of melted problems; now I sit dealing out my tattered tarot of strangled, bleeding bank statements, losing lottery tickets and tiny scraps of paper holding phone numbers without names, putting the question over and over to the soggy… Continue reading a poem about making sense of life

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW You must know how it feels by now, when all that’s left are the bars where we drank from long, cool glasses; when all the lazy weekend hours that we built up into jutting totems and soothing fetish objects have drifted out like coiling vapours through the cracks in life’s hinges.… Continue reading a poem about regrets

As you walk along the wide slow street at dusk you see him sitting in his chair; sometimes he waves, warding off questions with one hand while calmly taking notes with the other for an alternative history of everything. If masks could make us tell the truth, then his would still be hung behind the… Continue reading the town of retired war criminals