Melaleuca Number 9: March 2010 Table of Contents Details Andrew Burke Andrew Burke Andrew Burke Barbara De Franceschi

Barbara De Franceschi Rae Desmond Jones 3 4 5 6 7 8 Editor: Phillip A. Ellis

Judges Report for Young Mothers Who Write

Whitebait Agapanthus Dystopia My family & other animals

All works are copyright by their respective creators, 2010; the arrangement of this collection is copyright by Phillip A. Ellis, 2010. 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/>.

Details The house whispers its discontent and keeps me up with its incessant whining. The trick would be to turn off, like the filament in the bedside lamp when I press the plastic button beneath the shade. The physics of the real world, not the metaphoric, are life without you: the dozen details of each eventbringing in The West Australian, shaking it free of dewdrops, watering your plants, removing my wet sandals. Details. Like the atmospheric control light I've never noticed in the refrigerator before. Beep, it complains. Beep. Beep. Details like that. I can tell you now you're so far away how many steps lead from the front door to the letterbox. The house rises before me and clears each room of any life that might be there to join me as I rise from my chair, walk out, say 'Hello?', return and read your itinerary again. Andrew Burke

Judges Report for Young Mothers Who Write

Thank you for letting me judge your competition. Yes, your poets are well-schooled. The poems were bitter sweet, and the quotes from offspring of Young Mothers Who Write were quotable over coffee. All images turned well, like a well-tuned clavichord. Yet I cant help thinking todays orchestra, if you dont mind the metaphor, has more instruments in it: computer, synthesizer, co-sine generator. All these can be put to surprising use. Maybe its just me. Perhaps I have read too much and now tire easily of the well-schooled poem. A piano has 88 keys, yet it also has strings, a lid and legs. It is melodic and percussive. Hit it! Let it ambush the well-schooled listener. Let a leg kick the melody around. In this world, we are slaves to expectations, so again, maybe its me poetry should jump the fence and escape the ruts in the well-worn track. Go out on a limb! In closing, may I thank you especially for the well-penned cheque. It hit the spot just right.. Andrew Burke

White-bait White-bait, those tiniest sliver of silver words, swim into my mind from dark nights when Mother would feed the surprise guest brought home by Father with one too many drinks in him. Many times they would mumble apologies while mother speared a tin of King Sound White-bait and started toast cooking. Father brought home interesting people, men who had caught his ear at the yacht club or the Naval & Military Club: an American film actor, a CSIRO scientist, a touring Italian pianist, a war hero with tin legs. Mother would heat whitebait slowly in a cream sauce, and when the toast popped-up (we had a modern kitchen), she would say, Sit down, sit down, and all the white-baits eyes would look-up at my father and his guest swaying like sailors just come ashore. Andrew Burke

Agapanthus There is a cadence to agapanthus. Clumps stay evergreen as a courtesy to all seasons, tall summer flowers in white or blue mesmerise a stunned sky. Beetles stagger from making love in the slender understorey, grass swells into an ocean as it tries to fathom the beauty rising above other plant-life like sacred cupolas. The tone of this poem is delicate lingerie falling petals return secrets to pod. Barbara De Franceschi

Dystopia An old woman weaves human sinews on a loom with blackened notches. A man seated on the stomach of a dead elk carves antlers from petrified bone. Pieces of burnt sky fall on desecrated ground, stone passages with waylay on their mind beat a howling chant. Trees are unleafing one minute there is green then everything changes, landscape becomes whitehaired, a summer frost consumes the air in a damp shroud. Reason clatters like an empty freight train cocaine, cocaine. Barbara De Franceschi

My family & other animals Everything about them is so much of me Down to the appetite, a hungry sweet tooth, A kind of inverted vomit Driven by passionate fury At the inevitability of loss & death & a dogs capacity for obsessive love, A lions lazy selfishness, The calm indifference of the elephant, The cold smile of a snake baking on a road. Rae Desmond Jones