Poetry on the Moon.

 How exciting! Two of my poems are going into the Lunar Codex, i.e. will be in a time capsule to be sent to the moon, on the initiative of my online friend and sometime mentor, Sam Peralta. (The person who taught me, among other things, not to be afraid of attempting sonnets – and then, the variety of sonnets one may attempt.) Further details of this project at the link below.

The #LunarCodex inducts into the Polaris time capsule the authors of dVerse Poets Pub's CHIAROSCURO anthology, edited by Björn Rudberg and Mary Grace Guevara

Polaris is targeted for the 2023 SpaceX / Astrobotic Griffin lander / NASA VIPER rover mission, headed for the Lunar South Pole.

* * Now indexed in https://www.lunarcodex.com/poetry * *

My poems in the book are:

At Mariner's Café

We like to call in here

on the way home from Kingscliff

or even Tweed Heads (a detour) to catch up

with our friend, the new manager

– and the coffee’s good.

So is the view of the river.

In late afternoon sun,

we sit back, leaning on the wall

of the antique shop next door.

I peer inside at nets and creels, ropes, 

huge balls of deep green glass, 

and steering-wheels in dark, polished wood.

I want to meet him, the shop owner,

to yarn with him and sniff the salty air –

this man who so loves boats. Our friend

wipes down our table. Another customer,

loud-mouthed, at last vacates. ‘That’s the man

from the shop,’ our friend mutters. We all grimace.

5/8/16 

My Home River

Ah, river, river, silver river!

Island-born, I lived inland;

loved you, river,

even more than I did the foaming ocean.

Floated and swam in your slippery-smooth embrace: 

your delighted daughter

sunlit or shadowed, under trees overhanging the banks, or among         reeds,

or out in the exposed middle.

Each patch of river had its own 

separate, boundaried temperature: shiver-chill

or warm in a way that relaxed and expanded the blood.

River, river, my childhood river,

winding through my years, the first fifteen,

before I was moved too far away – 

pouring down the gorge, erupting in rock-punctuated torrents

or else spread like a lake, underneath fleets of little boats ...

you are my home, my love, my heart, 

if only in memory, still forever –

real river, dream river,

never lost, 

never forgotten.

22/3/17

Tamar river (Tasmania) from Brady's lookout (near Exeter). 
Original uploader was Kyle sb at en.wikipedia - 

Transferred from en.wikipedia
Permission details GFDL-SELF-WITH-DISCLAIMERS;
Released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Sightlines – a collaboration between poets and artists

Sightlines was the name of an art exhibition held in April 2022 at the Small Works Gallery in Murwillumbah, NSW (Australia) – a unique collaboration between artists and poets, which was launched with a poetry reading. 

Five local poets, including me, were invited to submit poems which might inspire 11 local artists. This collaboration was very exciting for us all!

I submitted haiku, for the directness and immediacy of the visual images. Three artists chose four – or five – of them. (In the transcribing, sending poems over the internet, two haiku managed to run together as one poem. And hey, it really worked! An artist responded to it as a whole.) 

To read the haiku, see all the artwork they inspired, and read what the artists say about the experience, see here. 

Image © Annique Goldenberg 2022,
photographed by Rosemary Nissen-Wade.