The old dust was left behind;
it hatched crystals,
snowflakes,
a multiverse
dining with itself
around a table.

Heart twigs beat
against the breath and
winding legs patrol
a speck of flesh;
red neurons fire
the sedge, slip below
the iris of lagoon.

Shuffle the pool,
there are diamonds;
numberless suits,
a face.

The dry has blinked.
The tear can’t miss.

Ben Walter

'Line Up, Teeming' first appeared in 'Poets and Painters: Celebrating the Big Punchbowl'.

walk hard –

grains of weather glitter like the night has sunk,
streaks of thin stars, light rain sharpening the scrub;
we are small, so small in the draining sky
as squalls stroke searching for our skin.
sweat-slumped on tussocks, raw pools
smoking in the famished sun.

dragging mud across my knees,
I whip my skin with shards.
words are blunt in whisperings of gust.

walk hard –

no honour now for forms of fashioned sand,
trudging hymns and letters from the pines,
so many echoes pressed on pebbles; our feet
recite their chants as eyes beseech
the cool vaults hammered from the cloud,
split pews slung by wavering columns.

the yellow gums were moved,
I have candles in my hands.
this calendar of worship nettles moons.

walk hard –

such easy mist settling in low valleys;
wooden toes adrift from maps, the margins
dense and white. our fingers cease
to link in cramped log barricades with
rats scrawling slogans on the walls. where then,
the vision of our bodies lifted up?

we do not walk as withdrawn saints,
we do not go naked into the west.

Ben Walter

if we are straws slurping
at this pool, it is to slake
our own thirst; we have
claimed this land as
ten thousand flagpoles
needing no flag, but
we are gentle sceptres;
a nest dispersed and
cradling paper wings.

this silt: our home,
where all legs hurry
as their days dry up;
this rot: our mother,
tadpole to sedge. and so
we murmur the rhythms
of frogs when our strings
are plucked by breeze;
we are instrument and stave,
a hymn to this, our year.

while some quiver at our spears
lancing air, we know
enough to stake
this tent of water till
the border nears. there,
we open the ground,
let the water through
unfiltered; there is
nothing left to fear.

Ben Walter

'Sedgeland Nation' first appeared in 'Poets and Painters: Celebrating the Big Punchbowl'.

While we circled space,
the paint-stained grass
and the dogs in-and-out
huffing their thoughts, he’d told us
how they tried to gill our work and rest
in languid backyard bays. The bolts
in rock, firm in life and death, were now
exempt from clasping hooks to bring
the bait aboard, protected
like the tiger, like the quolls;
like rocks, we thought
like rocks and sand and water. Well,
rules drift out with tides, and now
on a coastline full of empty hands, four
outcrops wait on a rare rock raised. Levering,
I made one limpet lost, its tiny foot or hand
stepping round the emptiness, clenching
its shell like that would save it. Afterward,
I thought of Bishop’s fish; no
grandeur in that strange thumb
waiting in my palm, no
rights of kingship or respect, no
victories to stand on or trumpets to blast. A drab
shell opening a place to sit, rod sleeping, in
hollow water near the jetty. So why
the strange projection, my own
arriving in another when the knife
wavered over the limpet and my hand,
limpet and hand, till both hands dropped
to paint an old picture on the rocks?

Ben Walter