so for you
it’s a god of sugar, a god
of shallow forgives,
it’s a god of stained truth
and glass asunder,
it’s a god of textas on sky,
a god of not asking,
it’s a god a drips and akimbos
but it’s not a god of metaphors,
not a god of pressed tin
celings or pianola rolls,
not a god of clouds
or of cut buffalo,
not a god of zephyrs
nor a god of sweet unseens
— Kevin Gillam
Story of God
My story of God seems
pass the tambourine
and do we have a dollar
here for Jesus.
Essentially, it is
disaster relief,
as history made
not in tutorials,
but from middens of waste.
Best interpretations
are so far off the mark
they must be a laugh
if they last a decade,
then like the wireless
of the forties
maybe derivations will remain.
Create a phonetic alphabet
with one sound missing
randomly chosen by algorithm
in a very limited edition
to be printed on a sheet
of guillotined B4
in six point calibri
and you may start
to get the picture.
When futility had truly tired of me,
only devotion would let it be.
— Michael Crotty
Two Women
Everything unfolds
and Mary picks her way
through cosmic calls
to grace
and the here and now
of shock and awkward explanations.
Elizabeth knew
and women together
they celebrated
the ill matched threads of history
stretched into the one cloth
lifted up and filled
until it floats above them
interweaving prophecy
and deep dreaming.
— Jorie Ryan
Kevin Gillam is a West Australian writer with work published in numerous Australian and overseas journals. His two published books of poetry are Other Gravities (2003) and Permitted To Fall (2007), both by SunLine Press.
Michael Crotty is a Sydney poet.
Jorie Ryan is an Anglican priest who lives in country NSW. She has three books published and writes of the spiritual in the everyday.