We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 115
SUMMER 2008
POETRY
On entering the city of possibilities
Cry a little. People expect it. It will show you are happy
to be there.
Reach out; touch all you can before it’s frowned upon,
before you are accused of appropriation
(any imprint you leave will have some historical value).
Learn the language. Learn how to speak it with your eyes,
with your hands. Lose your accent incrementally –
too slow and you’re not trying hard enough,
too fast and who do you think you are?
Experiment with suspension of disbelief as if
any city could be the city of possibilities.
Don’t forget to breathe.
Search for meaning. Briefly. It’s not worth the grief.
Turn your deep longing for something more into art,
into the opposite of neutral territory.
Fall apart. Pull yourself together. Fall apart. Don’t make a habit of it.
Break all the rules but not all at once.
Remember you are just visiting. Try not to get too attached.
When you’re ready, come home. I’ve left a light burning in the ruins.
JANE WILLIAMS is the author of three collections of poetry and one of short stories. Her latest collection is Begging the Question (Ginninderra Press, 2008). Samples of her work can be found at www.janewilliams.wordpress.com
Reading John Morrison
I’ll never leave the Left, however much
I palm them off or curse them, they’re in touch
by ways and means that have to do with order
and how things ought to be, beyond the border...
Reading Morrison again, I still recall
seeing him at Realist Writers meetings; if the Fall
has literary counterparts those sad, few
times I attended bring that world in view
and he, some twenty years older than me,
I still remember very favourably...
At one meeting there I read some stuff
that got a savaging (and fair enough,
it was too Dylan Thomas-ish, I know
even though its treatment then was quite a blow).
Reading Morrison again, I wonder what
became of the young bloke (a sawmill-hand, like me) who got
me to go to the meetings in the first place when
my reading of Koestler, Silone, Orwell, had by then
disabused me of any radical socialist stance
– but I’m still grateful, Chris, for whatever chance
threw us together in that timber-yard,
where the work was risky and bracingly hard
and mistrust of workers placed us in full view
in doorless dunnies.
Morrison’s true
tales of the wharfies world still speak to me
of whatever endures of solidarity.
BRUCE DAWE has published thirteen books of poetry, one book of short stories, one book of essays, five children’s books (Penguin) and has edited two other books. His collected edition,
Sometimes Gladness, was named by the National Book Council as one of the ten best books published in Australia in the previous ten years. A German language edition Hier und
Anderswo (Here and Elsewhere) was published in 2003. He was awarded the Order of Australia in 1992 for his contribution to Australian Literature.
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