Stretched Kite - Greg Battye

Bête à chagrin    

a thin morning, Canberra cold, and the cat    

is sleeping outside, he’s dozing out there    

dying in the sun, not knowing it, he thinks    

perhaps how sunlight feels on skin, how birds’ wings    

sound the air, he tastes the drugs on his tongue    

this is the matter of his life    

a life of feeling not thinking, of being not might be    

a human heart can’t be:   I am want, he is satisfied with is       

for him an easy death, for me old words   

like chagrin come to mind, and I must make the call, rule the line    

he purrs again, I stroke his staring coat    

he’s metaphor of course; all cats are, all loves    

he blinks, dying in the sun       

I can’t find the gap between want and ought    

now might be shifts into will and don’t becomes yes                      

the sun the only bright spot on a hard-edged day    

Jen Webb    

The Thylazine Foundation: Arts, Ethics and Literature 

http://www.thylazine.org/archives/thyla9/ph.html  

Paul Hetherington 

http://www.thylazine.org/archives/thyla1/swmd.html
Sarah St Vincent Welch 

Cape Dog - Greg Battye

SEA

As if kneeling at prayer 

on the sand’s glistening rug 

the sea 

is always bowing. 

Warm and clear in rock pools, 

more often opaque 

with timeless, chill repetitions, 

it holds its shadow 

underneath the blue of surface 

like an impossible dream. 

Its mystery 

is not how deep it is 

but how various. 

When it falls forwards 

it has been trying to stand. 

Paul Hetherington

Words in a Time of War
by Matthew Ricketson