Today’s choice
Previous poems
James Norcliffe
Sarsaparilla Road
travels through swamps
and reeds, over a black
water creek and a narrow bridge,
past the swift river with all
of its snags and eddies,
through the winding gorge
of slippery-back slopes,
scarps of limestone
and galloping gorse
to where children parked
in cars wait and wait under
a deepening sky, pink clouds,
sarsaparilla and raspberry,
a bribe sweet and bitter
in their mouths, and
still sweet, when they
fall asleep, the hotel lights
yellow in the darkness.
NZ poet James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry including Shadow Play 2013, Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (VUP) 2016., Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). His Selected Poems: A Day Like No Other will be published early next year. In 2022 he was awarded the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry.
William Stephenson
The Human Market Animals gather beneath a plasma screen in the square: a colony of lemurs with calculators in their paws, lizards with phones that twitter and purr. How did you get here, naked, bruised, unshaven? An owl scratches numbers into your...
Claire Walker
Emily Little love, I see your face, so like your grandfather’s. There is the obvious - his July-lion’s mane tamed to your September copper. But me in the middle, part him, part you, I was always too distracted by laundry, homework, things that keep a...
John Greening
1901: The Interpretation of Owls (Four owls on a branch, and one on its own, all smoking long churchwarden clay pipes, and listening to the music of a songbird in front of a giant moon – like five patients waiting for wise Dr Freud.) The First...
Carolyn Oulton
Vaccination Day At the surgery my mother doesn’t want to wait in the car, keeps opening the door. It’s deadly out there, and all I can think is she’s going to say Yoohoo! It’s Mrs … yoohoo! No one is actually warm enough. Mr Poole never does turn...
Carla Scarano D’Antonio
A safe den When my girlfriends come we delineate our territories. I build a fence with a cradle, two chairs and a stool, a cut-out space that protects and defines against trespassing. Knitted blankets cover my baby dolls, rags are my curtains. I arrange...
Nora Blascsok
Something Boy, I see you, turn up day after day, crouch by the pond, assortment of snacks, hold out a hand or stand still as air. Trackies, oversized tee, slowly scattering feed, pigeons land on shoulders that carry the world, there’s room for a thing...
Lucia Sellars
moment Once upon a teacup, I woke up. The eyelids yawned and reality percolated down. This is not how rain starts, this is not how the world keeps on its axis. I had a hat to cover my sinful thoughts, and a mouth, to zip them in. My hands...
Philip Dunkerley
Flying Away I sit watching the green line on the screen, your flight moving relentlessly onwards, away from me. Everything feels hollow. So many people here didn’t want you to go. What have we done to the world, how did we shrink it to allow us to...
Paul Connolly
Winter Thorn Before the bend he remembers what he usually sees at the bend even in mist-less and anemic days the thorn’s bespoke glow, a hazed corona of frozen smoke its branchlets weave and hold working the air with web, a murk his rallentando steps of...