Tinder Box
Foil of green light,
fire, whip crack,
snaps of timber
at the camp.
Smokey lizards twine around
roasting leather ankles,
pitcherfuls of water batter
full decks of leaves,
pound ghost tree branches.
Lacerating veins
dissect an ashen sky,
slow coach mutters follow
rumbling in the south,
somewhere else.
Handfuls of drops rattle
corrugated metal,
thin shield between
earth and sky.
**
Gliders
they’re here now
a dark shape slices the air overhead
as blue as his eyes
as glossy as her hair
in the silver-papered album
he carries her now
finally able to
as he always wanted, high
above the droning shapes below
which cannot touch them
her wings curve to meet his gusts
his arms of air
play with her, hold her
bring her the scents of bush flowers
brine from the sea
they soar, circumnavigate
their happy memories
and laugh that they are free
of misery, cold, accidents
fear and morality.
**
Walking with Cousins, Donegal
Fields of seventeen greens
and more bask in grey mist,
we visitors dream
in the quiet of
late dusk walks.
Soft greens, woven
by soft rains
strolled on by cattle,
black and white ramblers
here and there.
Fields full of
nothing farmers want:
strong mauve thistles
poison yellow daisies
hemlock, wild peas
And grasses too many
to count: forgotten
clover. A cry nearby;
`Corncrake’ says Rhoda,
from childhood.
We pass a paddock
fringed with
drowsy meadowsweet,
thickening the air
on summer evenings.
As the sun sets behind
Feddyglas, the old home,
with each minute
the light disappears
from another field.
**
Tuesday Questions
That we are,
that in one split-atomic second
we became.
Razor-thin slice:
a sliver of mortality on glass
astonishes.
Sensory power,
snaking signals to the nerve-centre
confound.
Is a star-flash
the romantic felling of energy
three years ago?
Could we believe
the trillions of miles and miles,
the breathless space
and endless holes
in the sky’s cosy blanket
might lead to someone else?
**
Monster
The monster of my labour is your child,
it has sprung from the loins of my mind,
fed by withered English gardens
and Geneva’s snow and azure sky.
On a stormy night in which we played
games of physicists and storytellers
the near-living thing, tormented into life,
howled in anguish at the horror of itself,
hideous in its joining of unlike flesh,
perverted in the slavery of its mind.
It lay upon the table of our imaginations,
vessel of ugliness and waste,
chained until we struck with our bolts
of vision, thundering of dreams.
We watched it writhe, turn from one
pain to another, scream at both its mother
and its father, secure in the laboratory
of our thoughts.
Has the key to the lock of restitution
slid into place? Will the creature turn,
tear the life from us, throw our bodies
to the waste heap of dusty shelves?
I can’t stop it, it grows, has broken out and gone,
Bysshe, it’s beyond us both.
———————————-
Bronwyn Rodden’s writing is published in literary journals and anthologies in Australia, the UK and the USA. She holds an MA Writing (UTS), was awarded an Emerging Writer Grant by the Australia Council for the Arts and a residency at the Writers Cottage, Bundanon. She was selected for the Scarp/UW New Poets Program, her poetry was published in the International Anthology of Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University 2022), she was a finalist in the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Prize and was selected for a QPoetry Chapbook 2024. She self-published a collection, Zen and the Art of Astroturf which was Recommended by the US Review of Books and her most recent collection, Stranded, was published by Flying Islands Press 2024. A poem of hers will be performed at the opening of the 2025 HERstory Festival at the Wharf Theatre in Sydney.
Stranded will be launched at the Newcastle Writers Festival on 5 April 2025 https://www. newcastle writersfestival.org.au/events/book-launch-flying-islands/ and is available from https://flying islandspocketpoets.com.au/product/ stranded/
