Wilding
When the beloved turns his face away and his sister gives you kind smiles. When you feel yourself slipping into loss and longing for what never could be. When you have paused for the day in a wilderness by the sea — an aching roll [...]
She of the Green Bough
I. I am the golden light unfolding, holding the first seed of becoming. I am the green bough unraveled, the curves of flesh that blur Into the trunks of trees, and my hair Is tangled in the forest's weave. Stars have fallen all around me, [...]
OF SCARLET TONGUES
If I were a poet, I would balance each word upon the many scarlet tongues of the bottle brush: suspended between sunlight and shade, and sipped by stripe-bellied honeyeaters with perfectly pointed beaks. If I were a poet, I would lay down my empty page [...]
SOUTH-WEST BELONGING
This poem won the 2011 Perilously Short (Nature) Writing Competition sponsored by Perilous Adventures Magazine. Southern seas baptise her. Tall forests cloak her green. Karri, marri, jarrah – sound their names like psalms in a landscape that maps longing into deep belonging. She is a [...]
DISPLACED SOUNDSCAPE
Let maybe-owls or flutter-tongue frogs plait sound-ropes – silk and polyphonic, veronese green through grey – with stuttering of staccato-moon crickets to titillate the gladdening dark, displacing and disgracing hallowed ghosts away. Published in Sunlight of Ordinary Days by Twelve Poets of the Peter Cowan [...]
RESURRECTION AT POISON POINT
This poem was performed with two voices at the 2010 Festival of Voice in Denmark, WA and won first place in the Poetry Slam Championship. Stepping across slanted stone, rimmed by marri and peppermint and the crenellated calls of cormorant and swan, the [...]
SHIMMER AT LIGHTS
Granite has gathered this pocket of sea no crash, no rip where memory’s sediment glitters free Seaweed words weave and wrap, slip and slap, without current slide into tidelines with shattered shell feet till veiled verse laps salted, green, and breaks into shimmer a glimmer [...]
PINK PELARGONIUM
Dune-locking pink pelargonium – petals laddered with dark diamonds, leaves crisped to small green fists, clenched against salt and wind – what gentle siege is this? Published in Dark Diamonds (Hallowell Press, 2012)
Connecting Community Through Collaborative Writing
Article published in Solace + Yearning – Poetry and Dance of Belonging (Vivid Publishing, 2014, 2nd ed. 2019) I was deeply honoured to participate in the creation of both Our Secret River (2010) and Solace+Yearning (2012), originally conceived by creative director and choreographer, [...]