Here I will post my latest poetry. I have a collection due out in 2020. Poems posted here will not necessarily be in that collection.

the road and the rain

Spider webs on our car lead you to wonder aloud

about a new species of spider called Wing Mirror.

Three paddocks over from State Highway One,

I glimpse the forward motion of a silent train

dragging its grubby white necklace of containers.

In the enclosed space of a car, free range thoughts roam

following their own random map.

Journeys within a journey. Leading me

into remembrance of things once heard

on the radio — long lost lexicons: fishing reports,

the daily round up 

of the vegetable market. Chicken Man at lunch-time.

And how we’ve lost the word ‘bowser.’ 

And the word ‘truly’ as an affirmative remark.

Under the tyres of a truck ahead, puffs of rain. 

We pass a gravel pit, a patchworked hayshed,

queueing poplars. A choir of dead trees. 

Redundant tyrannosaurus rex irrigation systems.

When we arrive, a skylark is there to lead us 

to the right end of the beach.

Where my ancestors are buried.

A tiny bird dealing with a tough wind.

‘Heading west but going east,’ you say.

We find the lost graveyard

where tīpuna, say, ‘Leave us be.’ 

Leave. Us. Be. That works.

The sea snowy with breakers.

The skylark still battling.

We travel on, country music

barely discernible

above the sound of the road and the rain.

Kilometres farther into the future,

to your ancestral land,

where a lake smacks its lips on a beach piled high 

with driftwood. Your grandparents used it

for firewood, you say. Hauling loads back home

by horse and dray. Above us — silent, dark, small

— a swift scythes through the last of this long day’s light.