Poems
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karri
By Scott-Patrick Mitchellkarris will always remind me of you
how we drove through a canyon
of ancient wood, marvelled at how
sky bowed in boughs, us driving -
Mallee love poem
By Luke SweedmanWe came to the mallee in spring
When dawn and dusk light shone
And the scent of the seasons
Blew warm in the soft spoken wind -
Anatomy of a Lignotuber
By Nandi ChinnaStacked on the back of a truck,
delivered to suburban houses,
a lignotuber may be known as carbon,
energy stored, until tossed into the fire, -
Marri (Remembering Meelup Regional Park)
By Scott-Patrick MitchellThe forest breathes us in. We are chasing bush orchids. Kambarrang is singing. Through a macro lens, petals bend, fill the screen. Blue; beard; duck. Your grin dazzles, blonde hair curling around my heart. We laugh. The forest smiles with us. Donkey; elbow; leek. Beyond the breadth of this, ocean swims. Here is the place of the moon rising. The fo… -
Macrocarpa
By Nandi ChinnaThe show takes place on the edge
of the car park. We sit in our cars,
engines cooling, as swirling red stamens
thrust off their woody caps. -
kangaroo paw
By Scott-Patrick Mitchellblood beats red, thumps in
elation, dread. how, as an
immigrant, my ears rang
with this land sang diaspora -
In mind’s eye
By Luke SweedmanMallee in my mind’s eye is mostly a below ground affair
what we see above is only a part of the overall mystery
the multi stems above ground are part of the living heart
that sends a maze of roots below to unknown depths -
Sorrow and Beauty in Equal Measure
By Nandi ChinnaMottlecah - Eucalyptus macrocarpa
In 1842 a macrocarpa was grown from a seed at Kew Gardens
It flowered five years later in 1847.
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Koolark—Home
By Daniel HansenFrom the woodlands to the Sclerophyll,
Of the Eucalypt Forests I know,
Within the air I can certainly feel,
A benevolence which resembles that of Home. -
Banksia
By Scott-Patrick MitchellI thought they were a bird. Or rather, birds. On a branch, flocking. Out on a limb, imagination sparking. The mind can transform, as can fire, with tongue, laughing. Like a tired owl, hiding its eyes, the banksia misplaces birdsong, not singing. But rather in bloom. A thousand individual flowers spiral upward as feather. Beneath all of this, banks… -
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise
By Nandi ChinnaMeelup Mallee
Progeny nursed in its lumpen fist,
a giant inhabits the limestone ridge.
Shy in its limey cave of soil, -
Exploration in mallee
By Luke Sweedman“A load on each spirit, a cloud o’er each soul
With eyes that could scan not, our destiny’s scroll”
~ Ernest Giles crossing the Great Victoria Desert
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In Search of the Meelup Mallee
By Nandi ChinnaHeading south, windscreen wipers
frantic, breaking waves of runoff
beneath Mandjoogoordap Drive.
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Mallee desert
By Luke SweedmanThe morning in the Great Sandy Desert
is an entirely new narrative of the senses
Thryptomene shrubs and mallee stands
a tonic, a memory, a gift that recompenses -
In the Mallee Garden, Kings Park
By Nandi ChinnaA global mix of accents and dialects
echo along the terraces,
rising and falling amongst the flowers.
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Jarrah (buying the block)
By Renee Pettitt-SchippEucalyptus marginata
I am a shooter, the seller says
and neither of us meet his eye
earth, shade of a wound, up high -
Red Flowering Gum
By Scott-Patrick MitchellHome is a syllable in your heart. In order to speak it whole, you must clap it out: with glee; in ovation; as sarcastically as the Venus de Milo. Here, you build new monuments from stone, adorn altars with flowers the likes of which you have never known. But the Latin names are familiar, because back where you came from, somebody thought it’d be a… -
Fremantle Mallee
By Nandi ChinnaEucalyptus foecunda
Every now and then I go visiting
my guerrilla trees, -
Desert Delirium
By Luke SweedmanThe desert is a brooding furnace of sand
remote dunes, a night sky full of unknowable stars
falling, flying and dying like all of us can
a place that in season leaves no heat in the land
