I Home I About I Contact I Guidelines I Directory I World I Peace I Charity I Education I Quotes I Solutions I Photo Gallery I Archives I Links I

Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #2/thyla2k-js AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 2 The Poetry of John Stokes Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of John Stokes by Heidi Smith, 1999. I Cutting The New Line I Bogongs I Organic Farmers I Winter In The Village I Cutting the New Line Cicadas. The forest eats. I know I must see them again, the dark prisoners, in their blistering chains, strung out by their necks; beads of black ponds, coiling into the stations of guilt-creaked iron. Each man, I know must be silent as if dreaming, each one must name no names, each man must have that same face: indifferent fear of the gaolers; benign, curious collectors of black princes.              I'll smell their ghosts in the blossoming mind- wood of the stations, in the yard-beat of furrowed ground, the dry -felt drum-screech of creeks murdered in eucalypts and crow-cry. They must be my other selves: the watchers by day, the prisoners coming in under guard from imagined judgement, the singers in the canopy.              'Though I know nothing I do now can help them, I will bludgeon patterns from their shadows, sibilant on the hill-brows, wreak hopeful messages in the bark-skin speak out the old rhythms along the scribbling lines              'though I know nothing ... Published in ANU Reporter (Australia) Bogongs are like eating fat   rock granite ripples   moth carved a million tickles   the mouth you strip the wings   bite down on nut   -oiled flesh they taste   like moths You can gulp   a native slapping feet   on stone bellies sweat   light leave your mark in every   bite play at evolution's menu   a mouthful of whirred suns. Organic Farmers Our neighbours keep to themselves appearing only to their own mysterious business they dig, both sexes, with unshaven faces, legs, legendary smells they farm their bottom ground in exotic orbits of pungency with earthly spells and buried cowhorns chanting by moonlight dancing with rhythms of night rains swelling in the semen dark their grubbed and hissing ground spits back the public scorn: "There's got to be something in it" we scream each year just the same their monstrous prods & howls seem to produce - their muttering ground sicks up squash & jakfruit, pineapple, marrow tangles of carobs, fronds of neem huge unspeakable fruits in darkness & every Christmas they come round & leave a striped melon on our doorstep vanishing into wet dark. Winter in the Village A chord of a man dead drunk holding up a drunk shed rush-bent, hills-old & she-willows, bending stalks to black the river's clefts. Shards of chalk soil, coloured sky licking along the points of the river, the whip and tuba beating. Here is the village fool, pretending to live forever, finding a name for love in the alter of a stoneshadow, shuffling the children in the shade, chatting up a yuppie witch out of memory; an RM Williams lookalike, raving and thumping against an irrelevance of BMW's fumbling kerbside, sunfingered, until, shit-scared, the aerials purr up & in another country, the guns begin to sing. About the Poet John Stokes John Stokes is an Australian short-story writer and poet who has travelled widely in Europe and Australia as a surveyor, a town and environmental planner, and an adviser on Landcare, Rivercare, salinity and sustainable agriculture. His work has been widely anthologised in Australia and North America; including in journals such as Idiom 23, Muse, Redoubt, Scarp, Studio, Ulitarra, & Voices. He reads on radio and at various festivals. He won the Woorilla Poetry Prize in 1996 and has been runner-up in various regional prizes. John says that his present passion is Australian landscape as backdrop, and as an emotion for human violence or awe. He is trying to be brave and report back from the country beyond love.    [Above] Photo of John Stokes by Heidi Smith, 1999. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.2 (September, 2000)