Three Poems from Australia

Göreme

A ripple of flicking eyelids,
a rooster’s cry
and the call to prayer
break through this dusty
Islamic morning.

I have been in this room before.
The tense jaws and
broken crockery swept into corners.
Dog snuffling outside the door.

I run,
dog at my heels,
to the top of the hill
where purple grapes
hang low from vines
rising from the pale earth.

From here you can see the ruins.
Columns cut from the rock
Walls collapsed displaying
doll house interiors,
cracked like my skin in the places
where I sat up all night scratching.

Ancient religious spaces
torn open like an autopsy.
Their soul weighed against nature.

Wild Dawn

Beneath cold rushing water
lies a heart shaped stone
washed smooth,
grey,
a solid piece of storm.
Within this stone thrashes
all of the wild.

I was washed up too
on that river bank,
grey mist dawn,
a stone in my chest
black and cracked,
rough as my unshaven chin.
I burrowed into my mud,
dragging that cracked heart free
and slipped the wild dawn stone
in its place.
Sunrise,
gold,
spring morning.

Edge

Everything rests on edge,
like the 59th second
of a minute waltz.
time stretching eternally
into the void between one note
and the next.

voices screaming in the yard
of a cottage on a hilltop
overlooking the bay.
mountains,
ocean views
and the rusted swings
blister the skin
of children in search
of laughter.