We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 119
SUMMER 2009/2010
POETRY
Bogong Moth
A Bogong moth
darts out of darkness
to seize fire –
it’s burned away its tarsi
yet continues to swoop,
kiss, careen, sizzle,
fluttering and candle-banging
like fawn-crazed Nijinski.I look up from my book
accepting the immortal,
fatal dance
of life and light,
like Icarus’s father
resigned to watch
his flying boy
hurl against brilliance.When you were a baby
night crying,
often the only way
to pacify you
was to bundle you
in your satin blanket
and walk along
Seventh Avenue.
The percussion of traffic noise,
street lamps, flashing head-
and tail-lights,
opened your brown eyes wide.
You were intoxicated.
and I soon lost you to sleep . . .O my little son, cocooned there
in that middle-aged man
who hasn’t spoken to me
for years –what flickering galaxies
do you fling yourself against now
for sleep,
far beyond my reach?
The Lion
The day the lion escapes,
zoo-keepers are frenzied:
liability insurance could go through the roof.
The last lion which escaped, from Taronga,shredded a wedding party in the gardens next door.
Wedding guests ran for cover
before the knot could be tied.
I have it that the lion ran off with the bride,neither seen again;
that’s been my trouble –
wishing the impossible,
lacking the courage for reality.The lion symbolises courage;
Saul Bellow’s Henderson sought it in Africa
in the skin of a lion.
As a new mother I took on a totem,a creature whose characteristics I admired.
I chose leopard: beauty, strength for the fight,
speed for flight, but I might exchange my spots
for courage, though it does the lion no goodwhen they decide to shoot her.
I once read that love is mainly courage,
It makes me think of Anna Politkovskaya
who loved truth,even the hard truths of Chechnya and North Caucasus.
Born in 1958, the same as me,
she got all the courage there was that year.
They shot her, too.
KATHRYN LOMER Her first collection of poetry, Extraction of Arrows, won the 2004 Anne Elder Award. Her second, Two Kinds of Silence, won the 2008 Kenneth Slessor Prize. Her collection of short fiction, Camera Obscura, was shortlisted in the 2008 Queensland Premier’s Steele Rudd Award. She has also published two novels.
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