Field Completion

It could be as insubstantial as memory-but did we once navigate by the moon

across the Braidwood Plains

collecting names and entering them carefully by lamplight

crowding in on the silver night’s map; Yaouk,

Gillamatong, Tantawanglo,

Yarrangobilly, Numbugga,

a slither of creeks all

called sandy or rocky,

a sliver of red-skinned

Smiths or Armstrongs dancing

along the edge of the metaphor?

Until, that is, the Geographical Names Board had a bureaucratic

attack of the mysteries and issued an Instruction. Then the practice had to stop;

this country was getting

too many names, names, names,

John Stokes

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Ground fire

 

            The Upper Hunter catchment

 

Burnt and shaved by slime

                                                 done fire dreaming

redhead comes eels & red-eyed

                                                        freckles girled

leathering along the shire - shivered

                                                               lone - eyed

lone breasted hill.  Night bound

thigh deep, travelling fast,

                                              the floosies scrubforest in

   cloak and dagger dawn

                                             skyfell

lost rips in smothered gullykiss, feathering

dieward,

                 red in the daygrass

ground boned,

                           haphazards

                                                dry cock crowed

rustles

             hapless

                           creeks of no-tree

Limbo or Shinto - all the same to the twist/   

     hiss of the limbless ones

who come to suck at stones and swallow fire.

 

 

These ghosts these

                                  Sisters

                                              singe the eyeballs as nuns

beat & scatter hope; a blunt shriek

& runting

                  bruise - groundflesh

traitoring  taunting 

                                 under the groundswell, under

marsh burned,

                          moistening pain

            coal-hunched

                        steam-heaved

             hard known

            veil-ridged

still-remembered cries

thud walled      

behind the cliff face -

 

bloodforms:

 

imagined ground

 

love-remembered water

 

John Stokes

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About John Stokes

John Stokes is a Canberra-based poet and short-story writer. He has lived, worked and travelled extensively in Australia, UK and Europe. John has been a surveyor; a town and country planner; and a program manager for Landcare and the Murray Darling Basin Initiative. His work has been published in such journals as Beyond Ben Bulben, Studio, Idiom 23, Voices, and anthologies such as the "There is no Mystery! - Lake George' and 'Ribbons of Steel'.

Recently he was runner-up in the Tanka section of the International Haiku Competition in Southern California. John has been shortlisted for the WB Yeats Prize and the ANUTech Poetry Prize; his verse plays have been broadcast on radio; and he takes part in performances at various public venues and festivals. John won the Woorilla Poetry Prize in 1996. This biog from the OZLIT site.

John writes in his email: "I happen to have been a surveyor for many years and then a town planner. These days I manage environment or landcare/rivercare programs and give policy advice to governments.  My latest landform poems actually try to form their own country by their appearance on the page - they are not concrete poetry but hope to present in the minds eye in the manner of the place they take place in."

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