Competition
2005 Winners
RT Edwards Awards – Open - Other Poetry
For Ern Malley
by Patricia Lee
Robertson, NSW
I
Midnight is the purgatory of the soul,
crackling movements and moans
shovelling in on itself.
The weeded hours
treasure fears of unrequited enthusiasm.
The notched stick of tasks
promised amid a landscape of leisure,
restocking the larder for a year's famine.
Notwithstanding the compulsion to
project
each year's end
as each days' end
as life's end in itself.
Take the stick and break it.
If not to the blood's passion
the dancing muse of the lips,
remember the stone above your head.
how it will lie each year the same
monotony of red lichen.
II
The dead invent themselves.
Their measured freedom
mocks our self -satisfaction.
Drunk on reputation
we, still living, ignore
the absolute concentration of eternity
on anonymity.
Threads of life run parallel
criss-cross on points of emotion,
dewdrops frozen on a leaf.
All that is beautiful is dead,
now or in the future,
Art is not the wind that blows dust away,
Art is the rain that makes it clay.