Something you treasure
Bring something
you've treasured
... and think what you
might have brought.
Might have brought books,
(sought books, abandoned books).
Might have brought sea things,
smooth stone, nautilus.
Perhaps just words,
spoken words, secret words,
with their connections,
influence, inference.
Or music,
its power, resonance;
koto, percussion,
captured experience.
Might have brought
fabrics,
remembered touch,
photographs.
Could come
without any thing,
holding
the thought of things.
–Lerys Byrnes
Upside down
Our children taught us how to hide
and seek the coloured birds and human tears. They're beautiful. With gentle thoughts our fighters tempt the violence of the word. We're learning, friends, elliptically. We're bloody on the tongues.
We drink. We dance with openly dark angels, strain our ears and wings to listen to the wisdom of the broken and the lost. We will discern the sudden dust we've come from beatifically.
We're turning all the nonsense upside down.
Where on the edge?
Where on the edge are the poems buried: sweet, ripe, evasive and unreal?
Here, here, here and here.
Friend, come and see the blood
stains
on the beaten body
of the world.
We're building something new and very good
with the stones from the streets here. This
is where we ripped them up
to bury little whispers of our poetry and blood.
–John Falzon
Lerys Byrnes is a Melbourne-based poet. Her work has been published in Australia, USA and the UK. Author photo by Rosa Lamberti.
Dr John Falzon is Chief Executive Officer of the St Vincent de Paul Society National Council and a member of the Australian Social Inclusion Board. His poems have been published in journals in Australia and the US.