Competition

Highly Commended

For My Father
by Mark Miller
Shoalhaven Heads, NSW

1
Saturdays Home from Boarding School

Even on Saturdays my father would rise early,
in the cold-bleak and crackling dawn,
well before I heard him in the kitchen,
stoking the fire and making fried bread –
never French toast - from the left-over dripping
and stale bread he’d kept in the cupboard.

He would bring it to me on a tray –
such a delicious start to weekends away from school
How could I not love him, how could
I not love this stranger, who made such offerings,
who would be gone before I got up

and would come home in the evenings too late,
too drunk, to see his newly polished work shoes,
his covered tea sitting on the cold stove-top plate,
and my finished homework, left open on the bench,
near where the lamplight stayed on.

2
Cleaning Out the Drawer

I find a photo of my father.
Nothing extraordinary, just standing
in his overalls in the doorway,
maybe returning from work
or coming back from feeding the chooks,
a cigarette dangling from the fingers of his left hand
his hat at a tilt over the right brow,
and his angular body dully back-lit.

Our eyes meet across the threshold,
but what do I know about this man
now that he’s gone from my life,
I who am now his age
and making all the mistakes
that I thought were his.

Highly Commended

Camping Upriver
by Mark Miller
Shoalhaven Heads, NSW

Day One

Beyond the edge of the clearing,
opposite where I pitch my tent,
I come across an abandoned hut,
its sheets of corrugated roofing
spilled and rusting in lantana,
its upturned water-tank
a crescent of jagged teeth
in the spiky grass;
there are animal droppings,
wallaby tracks, a worn path
beneath its broken and spattered floorboards
near a mound and Wombat hole
I pick up shards of crockery,
old medicine bottles,
I run my fingers over their smooth
and faded surfaces –
until disturbed by my fossicking,
pigeons explode from the rafters,
from the crumbling fireplace.
Looking up,
I see black shapes across the bloodred sky,
hear whisperings of other wings,
fruit bats escaping from the island’s trees,
before night collapses on the clearing,
on the hut like a black net.

Day Two

In the half-light of dusk
my line sighs
in its sinuous s-shape
through the air.
It whips the slack water
again and again,
before I reel in
a quiver of light,
a bass spinning and flipping,
its quicksilver slapping
beneath the lip of the current.
Unhooked onto the pebbled bed,
it flips onto its White underbelly,
and streamlines into the cold grip
of dark again.

Day Three

On the ridge
I pass from stone to stone,
tapping and splitting,
looking for fossils,
bits of crustacean,
bone shards,
a pine needle.
I bypass crystallised stones,
my eyes seek out others instead:
look, how in this light,
the hair-fine lines
embedded here in a russet vein
resemble a leafs filigree
or a fingerprint in sand.
I move on,
hear water churning
the banks below me,
whirling mixed pebbles and shells,
erasing history
from the river’s floor.

Day Four

Darkness pulls free of its moorings,
drifting off under a paling sky.
I sit with the dawn hum of insects
and watch the dance of water over rocks
the river’s broad coil of green
and beyond that, on the opposite bank,
the grey fur of feeding wallabies
skulking in a clearing of tussock.
I light the camp-stove,
soon it sets free its low hubbub of steam
I hold the mug in my palms,
its warmth melding my skin
as the valley shrugs off the mist
and its walls harden into stone.