Competition

Highly Commended

She Was a Girl
by Andrea Dawson
New Farm, Qld

Running babe with bright blue hair
Hits the path leading up a hill
Hot sunny day
Damn hot wind, her skin is breaking
And sweat like a river runs.

Body pumping, just a well-oiled machine
Pushin it to the limit
Waxin the breeze.

Can’t believe how good she’s getting
Running babe with bright blue hair,
Fat to thin, thin to skin,
To bones that melt into the ground
Hear a tune on the wind
Somebody says, “somewhere is over the rainbow,
Run somewhere, now.”

The girl changes her hair to a colour
Like red, no maroon and then like blood,
It runs like her legs up and down the hill

Which is changing as quickly as her from a hill
To a mound, as bulldozers effervescent in tangerine
Start to bump and grind,
Weather is cooler,
And wind slaps like hand to a face
Ice on a lip,

In a cloud of brown,
To match her skin,
Like sun-burnt well-done sausages her arms and legs
Are almost gone, like the hill
That has fallen,
Like the rain that drifts and drives and shakes the earth about,
People change like the weather,
Come and go like the wind.

What was a woman is
Now just bones,
Not bright blue hair streaming up a path,
No sausage arms and legs pouring down a hill
Just bones that come and go like the wind.

Highly Commended

She
by Kathryn Smith
Barellan Point, Qld

She came to me on a Summer’s night
When the air was still and the silence was deep.

I had felt her presence long before
I had felt her curious gaze
Then I heard a sound, a gentle sigh,
And the vision that met my eyes
Set my empty soul ablaze.

A vision of beauty in silver and blue.
Oh God, the breath I have taken for granted all my life
Was swept away, stolen from my very lungs
As she looked at me with an innocent curiosity.
Yet within the depths of her dark twinkling eyes
I saw an all knowing wisdom.
And suddenly I felt like a fool.

But then she smiled.
Her skin glistened temptingly
And I reached out to touch the droplets of water
That rolled down her silky skin.
She quivered, but I had lost sight of the boundaries.
I sighed, as she suddenly moved closer to meet my touch.
And as we connected I wondered at the intensity
Of the energy she emitted.
Had she come to show me Heaven on Earth?
Was this etheric creature just a dream?

In her glory, I was speechless.
In her radiance, I was fascinated.
In her beauty, I was tantalized.
In the illusion.....I was.

Oh, what a surrealistic night
Full of unexpected magic and wonder and bliss
As we spoke to each other softly, gently,
Knowing that this night may never come again.
A beautiful moment
An evanescent memory
To feel. To invoke. To love.

She came to me on a Summer’s night
When the air was still and the silence was deep.

Then the zephr arose
And she departed.
Back to the deep.
Back to the ocean.
Back to her home.