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Special N.02 – Poets speak up to Adani

The Eater of Worlds

by Michael Aiken

that doom-laden theme, reek

of panache and charm –

insidious storied lords,

more numerous than the planets

they’d consume…

 

Don’t compare you to a slug, many-armed,

vicious teeth, bleeding effluent

as you eat and eat…

 

Here, in this street, on this beach,

behind an office – anywhere outside

the bubble of the written –

you are nothing but a horror.

 

Armageddon sells

but this is one world you can’t remake.

When you eat it,

you eat yourself.

 

You can’t see it coming

but you’re about to swallow your tail.

Published: August 2022
Michael Aiken

is a writer living and working in Sydney. His first collection, A Vicious Example (Grand Parade 2014) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Dame Mary Gilmore Prize and the Australian Book Design Awards. In 2016 he was selected as the inaugural Australian Book Review Laureate’s fellow, for which he wrote the book-length poem ‘Satan Repentant’ under the mentorship of David Malouf.

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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