Melaleuca

Number 43: January 2013 Table of Contents Phillip A. Ellis Phillip A. Ellis Margaret Owen Ruckert Margaret Owen Ruckert Tiziana Speltoni Tiziana Speltoni A Soi-meme As in a Dream the Poem Appears able is an add-on empty church Australia Fair I Am a Wondering Prey 3 4 5 6 7 8 Editor: Phillip A. Ellis

All works are copyright by their respective creators, 2013; the arrangement of this collection is copyright by Phillip A. Ellis, 2013. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/au/>. You are free to make and pass along copies, so long as you do not charge money or goods for the copy, and as long as this and other issues remain intact. Submission guidelines: email 2-5 poems, any length, any style, any genre to phillip@phillipaellis.com in the body of a single RTF or DOC attachment. No bios are needed; cover letters are welcome. We accept previously published material and simultaneous submissions; if work is published prior to its appearance in Melaleuca you must advise us accordingly, so that proper attribution can be made.

A Soi-meme You've lived your life within a world of black and white, and shadows: come and take the light of many colours, leave and turn your back upon that older world, and on its night. The sky behind you's garish as the sun is setting, and your flesh is a blue that runs to deepness, like a shadow, yet you say this is not melancholy, but the day. Phillip A. Ellis

As in a Dream, the Poem Appears As in a dream, the poem appears, white as a fog in seasons of mountain towns, cacophonies of the songs of magpies stuttering behind the veils of whiteness, reciting lines from odes. The carolling echoes, recitals driven as from crackleless discs as of forty-fives, seventy-eights, and the singing is ringing, and rolling or roiling, the way of a cloud. Expanding, contracting, roiling and changing, the cloud in the ocean of air is a land that is changing, line to line, like to a scanned transition from strophe, antistrophe, epode. And suddenly, like a cloud over tall mountains, like the sun breaking into beams of slanting light an hour before the fall of day to night, the poem leaps as out of a forehead or a thigh. And this is the way the islands become moored, anchored to the bottoms of oceans or of seas, their wandering days now done, fixed on the charts we breathe with our lines of ink on white paper. Phillip A. Ellis

able is an add-on he has a removable sim she has a detachable bra he has a dog for company she works for company he believes in heroes she believes in sales he opposes censure she opposes torture shes tuned in hes switched off loses the grand final and makes headlines she wins a world series capable, cap in hand Margaret Owen Ruckert

empty church no, the J word doesnt redeem them these well-trained children of ritual think theyre elevated by dropping names and crossing their bodies insignia flashing high in their fortress and altar egos windows of stain are praised for their all-embracing light saying sorry is a smoke-screen easy as lighting a candle stone walls that bulwarked the horror now spall their horror into our hands the unspeakable love has found a voice children will sweat for 30 years and evidence is dark as text Margaret Owen Ruckert

Australia Fair I did not feel safe within the misty innocence of your looks, Old English country, printed in my memory, together with my home, those days, when I so much felt the pain of leaving Europe.... Here I am now, in this sunny place, white and huge: the heart seems to grow fond of her, day by day ..... Little by little I learned to contemplate the empty spaces and the relaxed solitude of Sundays afternoon..... Australia, I have given myself to you ; not to forget the past, which hangs over me like an ancient frame, but to know that this is my land, the land where I choose to be citizen of the world ... Tiziana Speltoni

I Am a Wondering Prey I am a wondering prey to thoughts and fears ,a prey to illusions, which does not want to be captured yet, lives in her cosy nest :the world leaves me its frustrations and I travel behind them, over flowers and garbage...... I do not mind if I pass through tribulations ,as long as I can come out into the fresh air, looking at the skyline And, flying like swallows in the spring, I follow the sun's rays... I go where the perfumed wind of the east brings me And I stay where I can find the wild winds of the west or I throw myself into space, like a meteor, into unlimited light... Tiziana Speltoni