Distracted, I moulded the darkness into the shape of your hips while you slept. Through the pillow I felt the splitting edge of the mental knife I’d stashed there overnight. Thinking I’d said too much already, I stopped my betraying mouth and started to think that this was just my body lying there, while my… Continue reading sleepless, fearing commitment
everything flows
EVERYTHING FLOWS The droplet born on the airless peak blends into the fresh, unspoiled stream first seen in bubbling infancy, hurrying over rocks of which it is ignorant, growing rapidly, impatient to reach the surging river, but even the river finally slows and calms, becoming a sedate brook set in its ways and laden… Continue reading everything flows
More Poems of Australian Childhood
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
News
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
Poems of Australian Childhood
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
Adultery
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
another bright sunday
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
a journey poem
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
a star 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
a poem about making sense of life
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
S.C. Flynn 