We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 114
SPRING 2008
POETRY
The Fish Eagle
Even when David Livingstone
was dying
he couldn’t stop loving
Africathe Africa that made his name
but killed his wife
and broke his health
still sated him
with rapturerapture
that had never left him
after he was shaken
like a mouse
in the lion’s mouththe blessed mouth
that mauled his arm
killed
his fear of deathdeath in the heat
death in the swamp
death in his own inevitable
weakness
in death’s weakness
Livingstone wrote of the nearness
of God
in the gleaming fecund world
of dangerous wonder
burning him up
in rapturein dying rapture
without a dreg of fear
he felt nothing but
restless gratitudegratitude in finding
exactly the god-given word
to take with him forever
the call of the fish eagle
hanging high over the
beautiful pestilent river
unearthly
DOROTHY PORTER Her most recent book is the verse thriller, El Dorado, which was short-listed for the 2008 SA Festival Awards for Fiction. The film version of her opera, The Eternity Man, (with composer Jonathan Mills) premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, 2008.
Curious about Cormorants
Tempted by the sea’s lull to snorkel,
I find their passage curious,
the way these great divers descend
to steal the frugal tips of waves.
Our group jack-knifes from the hem of reef,
paddles out. And something else sinks forward,
a lone cormorant, waiting hours, follows the
scuttle of sediment from swimmers’ legs.
Flippers sink into the eye of the blue,
identical hunters at best, careful over rock
and pool; probing for abalone, shrimp, and crayfish.
On channel marker, the cormorant spreads her gown.
Such a wingspan: the sea describing her as meditator,
crouching tiger, the Jing in the I-Ching,
cyclic Tui of the joyous lake.
And infused into her shape, where no oil begins,
is the rich glaze on black feathers,
dark as a rain-soaked night.
Even more curious is that final glide to rock;
a composure of wings drying out like laundry,
and a conviction, it seems, to be that still beauty at sea,
silent as effigy.
HELEN HAGEMANN has an MA in Creative Writing and teaches at the Fremantle Arts Centre. Her poetry and prose have been published in literary magazines and journals. She was
selected to participate in the 2008 Macquarie Group/Varuna Longlines Poetry Workshop CAMERON LOWE lives in Geelong. His chapbook, Throwing Stones at the Sun, was published by
and will be published in the Australian Poetry Centre’s New Poets Program. Whitmore Press in 2005.
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