Treasure Island, a sonnet
Within our happy harbourside retreat
we put on show of affluence and glee
and round the barbie with our friends we meet
or watch the footy final on TV.
Our leaders stop the boats, turn back the tide
of those who seek to storm our golden gates,
to let them know that God's not on their side
nor will we ever count them as our mates.
With every boat that sinks our grief's untold,
the smugglers just don't care they're overfull,
so join the queue, no need to bribe with gold
and get a proper visa in Kabul
or if we must, illegals to prevent
we'll just excise the whole damn continent.
Brendan Doyle
small and smaller islands
beaches, these doors swung wide
through barbed-wire cliffs, gates
held wide by a welcoming smile
of sand; land a place for landing and
the landed, greeting and the waving,
new bricks farmed and growth
embraced like fresh children;
______across the valley there
a tragedy of cliffs, no garden clinging
by its fingers, no symbiosis blending
in the soil; standing straight-backed,
staring out to sea.
Ben Walter
Blind tiger
They repatriated this security risk.
You'll be safe back home,
they assured him, the war's over.
He knew about the war,
forced to fight when still a child.
And he knew about over.
Over was why he risked death
to escape to a place
that sounded so safe and festive:
Christmas Island. Only he was flown
to another island where men
hung from beams like strange fruit.
Now he sits on a footpath
begging for coins, his eyes
punched out by bicycle spokes.
You'll be safe there, they growled,
the war's over. He knows
what it means to be blind.
Rob Wallis
Brendan Doyle grew up in a house without books, and now wants to build a house of poetry. He has published poems in Islet, Five Bells, Get Reading Postcards, Famous Reporter and Four W.
Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer and poet. His work has appeared in Island, Griffith Review, Cordite and Overland, and his debut poetry manuscript, Lurching, was recently shortlisted for the University of Tasmania prize, as part of the Tasmanian Literary Prizes.
Rob Wallis has published three volumes of poetry, the last, Man In A Glass Suit, in 2011. His poems have been published in Woorilla, The Mozzie, Poetry Monash, Wet Ink, Blue Dog and Westerly. He has won first and second prize in the FAW John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award, the Martin Downey Award for Urban Realism in the MPU International Poetry Competition, and the Castlemaine Poetry Prize.