Bio: Originally from the west of Ireland, Anne Casey is a Sydney-based poet/writer and author of five poetry collections. A journalist for 30 years, her work is widely published internationally ranking in the Irish Times’ Most Read. She has won literary awards in the USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, India and Hong Kong, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the Henry Lawson Prize 2022. She is a doctoral researcher in archival poetics at the University of Technology Sydney. anne-casey.com @1annecasey
The Minister for Bushfire Emergency is reassigned to Floods
To our north, a wedding couple watch
With countless millions as their connubial
home drifts slowly down the swollen river,
as fifteen thousand neighbours are evacuated
from their coastal community, where we basked
in beachside sunshine only weeks ago.
To our west, the mountain road I commuted daily
for seven years has slipped into the gully,
closed for the foreseeable future, friends
on either side of the great divide
marooned between mudslides.
Southwest, the city's main dam is spilling
over a year's water supply each day.
Our waterlogged lawn is awash
with motley foliage debris, fat silver
globules shimmering from every
moisture-glutted leaf surface,
fairy-lighting the fringe of the veranda
where a week ago I watched our dog
stand stock-still for a long while,
gazing out into the distant
skyline as if in praise
of the balmy evening's
languorous descent,
a swoop of sulphur
-crested cockatoo
alighting like
candles in
the waiting gum
(echoed in monstera
blooms flaring out of gloom),
first heralds of an electric
storm brewing in the pinkening
dusksub-rosa
presage that this country has more tricks
up its sleeve than the slickest
sideshow illusionist.
Tomorrow, they say,
this pummelling rain will
magically stop and sun
will once again
split rock.
*This poem was longlisted for the Live Canon International Poetry Prize 2021 and was first published in the Live Canon Prize Anthology 2021 and was subsequently published in ‘Some Days The Bird’ (Beltway Editions 2022).
Some days you’re the seed, some days the bird
Through the gaps in the fence, I'm watching a wattle bird bronco-riding a long, bobbing stem— so absorbed in plucking plump rapture from the dark crimson heart it's oblivious to the buck and weave, purple floral spikes brushing its scarlet cheeks like some portent from a forgotten fairytale, essential ingredient in a witch's secret scheme. Weeds thrive beyond the palings, the grass thigh-high in places, another sign of the times— like the boarded-up shops (one on our corner shuttered suddenly yesterday after twenty-five years), the half-empty city streets. A shard of sun catches a dragon-fly's rise over the fence. I saw some bush bees there the other day— the first in years since the now-disappeared council worker mowed their cluster of wind-seeded crocus. There are moments I'm consumed by the jolt of how our world has veered, others bewitched by the hum of wildness overcoming concrete. *This poem was Highly Commended in the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust 'Poems for Patience' Competition 2022 and was longlisted for The Plough Prize 2021. It was first published in American Writers Review 2021 and was subsequently published in Some Days The Bird (Beltway Editions 2022). Coastal descant Four hours north of our new normal, a daily changing tableau—already elsewhere from the chatter and chant of ascending scales in LA, London, Brazil; a sinkhole in Italy; a landslide in Java; a plane fallen from the sky; wreckage of the assault on democracy in DC— we have hurtled out of city snarls through eucalypt forests shooting new green across the blackened scarline of last summer's megafires, past vast shocks of long-legged birds wading near wallowing gums, their mottled trunks drowning in this year's floods, to breathe again clear air carrying a tincture of salt, a trace of coastal rosemary, count blessings falling like soft rain on your remote lavender, on my longed-for west-of-Ireland heathers and here, on spiring cordylines, Norfolk Island pines scraping a last skirmish of downy clouds, their slender cones far below snagging olive chains of Neptune's necklace along the snaking tideline, a sea eagle gliding high over sands fringed in the wild fleshiness of samphire, and higher over lobelia blooms purple-tonguing rain-swollen air; where blue triangles flit between the fresh dazzle of golden Guinea flowers twisting past ragged elephant ears sagging in steamy strangler fig shade, fishbone ferns filigreeing the drifting sea breeze here where banksia trees turn into wind off churning surf, their gnarled arms spreadeagled into brine-laden sky, contorting around rock, a symphony of seed pods parrots a lorikeet’s brief speech, and a psalm of cicadas echoes wave-song. The startling grace of a rainbow’s full cascade into cobalt ocean over a horizon thirteen thousand miles from my home coast, yet so uncannily alike; a ghost crab dances en pointe across our scarecrow shadows before we swelter uphill again through saltbush, a cuckoo mocking our blundering passage as three hundred metres below, the small blot of a lone swimmer sinks beneath the glistening surface a cormorant racing its own shadow over his wake. This poem was first published in American Writers Review 2021 and was subsequently published in Some Days The Bird (Beltway Editions 2022). A Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Anne Casey More books to purchase:
Fevers of the Mind 