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Keywords: New Australian Poems

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Syria's massacre of innocence

    • Various
    • 19 June 2012

    The hands which pressed triggers, wielded knives at innocent throats, were once the gentle sons of others playing in sand pits, shadowed from scorching winds, while I ferried my own to schoolyard bunkers and safe horizons.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Vietnam mates' post-war suicides

    • Karl Cameron-Jackson
    • 12 June 2012
    9 Comments

    My dad and his RSL mates repeatedly told us 'Vietnam was a toy-boy war, only 501 died' as though numbers are a marker of grief. My tears often fall in an unremitting flood for eight mates who committed suicide soon after they arrived back home.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Church's preferential option for kids

    • Brian Doyle
    • 05 June 2012
    5 Comments

    'No matter what we say it's about, it's about kids,' says the archbishop. 'If it's not about kids then it's not first priority. The worst sins ever committed are against kids. That will never occur again, not here, not if I have anything to do with it.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    God gathers dust

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 29 May 2012
    3 Comments

    Never hoards it, for he has new urns to make, for us to admire and, sometimes, to love.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Autumn on Australia Street

    • Brenda Saunders
    • 22 May 2012
    2 Comments

    I know it's autumn when exotic imports lose their cargo of leaves. Empty branches startle the sky, northern cut-outs curling in the sun catch on fence wire at the school, flooding gutters after rain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Prayer is a walk in the park

    • Aidan Coleman
    • 15 May 2012
    4 Comments

    When I feel the day is turning, I go — without a dog or child — to pray and walk the corridors of light and shade.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Spoor of a soul

    • Chris Wallace-Crabbe
    • 08 May 2012
    3 Comments

    At sleep's near edge I busily ask myself — redundantly, rather — where soul might have its home: Like the golden tumbling apricots right next door attending on Christmas, my body has attained what another age would have called a certain age.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Train gaze

    • Various
    • 01 May 2012
    1 Comment

    Her deep eyes glance up from the page
 without perceiving me, the hidden camera trained
 on her by my unbroken gaze. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Poets in wartime

    • Various
    • 24 April 2012
    2 Comments

    O for a day without comrades bloody fallen, lovers in guttural grief, shrieking, sobbing, and mothers in stoic dignity, mantillas drawn tight, our heroic flame, corralled colts brazenly waiting, cruelly snuffed. Have we learned nothing my friend? 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Problems with atheism

    • Various
    • 17 April 2012
    14 Comments

    The problem with being an atheist is the lack of possibilities, a world to come into being, a kingdom to be worked for, blood and sweated for, any hope of future travels curtailed with science.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Australia's mystic river

    • Poet
    • 03 April 2012
    3 Comments

    That river is almost embarrassed at the space it occupies — professionally shocked to be spotted despite the camouflage dust it wears. It scrawls on the grey-soil plains. This consecrated vellum is read by cockatoos.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Man versus wind

    • Alistair Stewart
    • 27 March 2012
    4 Comments

    The day has no front teeth, it raves in the street, it is grey as a tap, a murky x-ray of a multiple trauma. The front door keeps whistling old songs about going away ... these hinges hate me, not one screw will stay put. They are moving out.

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