VOYAGE OF THE ICEBERG Australian Antarctic Territory, midsummer Now evening’s wearing midday’s face. Our floating time capsule, sparkling and popping, is shoving through the flimsy sea ice. I now feel Gondwanan voices simmering beneath my feet; every rising bubble of air that gouges our tall ship’s sides carries off a puff of history. The penguins… Continue reading Voyage of the Iceberg

OLD TESTAMENT PLAGUES IN NEW MILLENNIUM CITY Inboxes swarm with junk mail locusts. Flies of stress buzz in corridors and settle in meeting rooms. Silicone boils gather and a collagen plague sweeps the cattle markets. Viruses pulsate through electronic veins and erupt on traders’ screens. The rivers of the underground run red with anger. No… Continue reading Four Poems

STRAW MEN IN THE FIELDS OF THE MIND Nothing stays the same when you look at it for long enough. There always remains an empty reality in the centre, a little town abandoned by the imagination; as soon as someone has been there, they tend to talk a lot less. It’s a feeling of being… Continue reading A Lesson from Loneliness

The World Wrapped snugly in its coat of space and time, the world puts up the hood and runs away, never showing its face and always one step ahead, casting us off like loose change as it goes. But the world doesn’t really move anywhere; it’s a balloon on a string thrown by a child,… Continue reading The World

In a strange land, everyone does what he must. As usual, the bird in my dream was a dove covered in blood that sat on my clothes rack, preening itself, spattering my shirts red. I catch and devour small kindnesses as if they were locusts full of the ripe fruit of domestic life, but for… Continue reading Diaspora

I should have known from the retching crow that passed on my way to the station that morning. The signs were there in the sprinkle of chocolate on my cappuccino, in the graph of plunging share prices hidden in the newspaper’s entrails. She’s gone; I should have known. The signs were there this evening as… Continue reading Omens

FIFTH VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS Tonga, 800 AD Take me with you, star duck, when you fly away down south; let me fix your broken wing. I remember watching you when I was young and dancing to music so sweet I couldn’t taste the food. You seemed so close then but now I wish… Continue reading Under the Southern Cross

Uluru, central Australia, 1000 BC You run fast, emu in the sky, on your long black legs. In every season that I’ve carried my children behind my husband you have been above. And the tree possum over your head has watched us with his hand of shining eyes. Stay over us, sky emu. Watch us… Continue reading FIRST VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS

THE WINE CELLAR In certain moments, I open the door that leads down to the hidden place. The musty air of neglect and broken resolutions meets me each time and the steps are covered with dust that I sweep away with my feet. It takes courage to descend without light, but I know it is… Continue reading Bridging Earth and Sky

For Claudia Maybe it absolutely had to be according to the laws of physics; it often feels that way, for sure, as if the whole history of the universe – the creation of the elements that made us in the hearts of vanished stars, the forming of the galaxies and planets, Earth’s atmosphere and seas,… Continue reading Love Explained, Or Not