Competition

Third Prize

Mangoes
by Wendy Davies

Mangoes – Melt in your mouth mangoes
Succulent slurp through your lips – Mangoes
Juices exploding from slippery skins
Breaking the dam of your mouth
And forming rivulets to your elbows.

Mangoes of your Queensland summers
Beckoning from laden trees
Calling you
Inviting and enticing your
Taste buds to try a little mango madness.

And it is madness.
For those mangoes hang from neighbours
Trees – like great yellow all day suckers
That need to be slurped and seed sucked
And spat out on the ground below

Whilst you reach your hand around
Just one more of the forbidden fruit.
Sharing the mango party with mates
Who have shimmied up the mango tree
With you and filled to overflowing

Their mouths with the nectar of the Gods.
The forbidden fruit that Eve did eat
Must surely have been made of this.
Sweet childhood days of sun and heat
Feasting in the shade of the mango tree.

Highly Commended

Gaza
by Sue Bailey

Two feuding groups
Hamas and Fatah
so far away
across the world
they seek an identity
a place in a pock marked
landscape
where back in ‘43
were sown the seeds of hate.

They sought to make a state
when in the midst of our second war
to end all wars
we bred another one

Gunfire’s stuttering cacophony
heralds new hate
and blood flows so readily
from freedom’s veins.

Families more than
half in love with the gun
kill love and patriotism
for territory.
Where is the messiah now
Who would crucify hate
In this Holy Land ?