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From: Vol.02 N.01 – Otherkind

Anxious Itinerant

by Patricia Sykes

Travel, the long impermanence,

winding toward a coast town

on a dusk road. Sunset, harbour,

and the chance of a fee bed

as if sanctuary can be paid for.

The estuary blinks all night,

one red eye, one green,

safe, unsafe, polarities of ebb,

flow. At daybreak, pelicans

calmly afloat, riding the same

pulse that rocked the womb

I slept within under a tin roof

whose stars chinkled like rain.

Now here, woken again from

darkness, inside a paper-thin

cabin crushable as infancy.

Years are not what ages

the span. The perpetrator

is longing, hover dreams

that weigh less than light.

Feet might yearn upwards

but bitumen is insatiable,

spider veins that entrap and

feed. Ground, the one solid,

encumbered, the anchor.

Published: January 2015
Patricia Sykes

is a poet and librettist. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Australia, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. Her most recent work is The Abbotsford Mysteries (Spinifex Press, 2011).

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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