Joe Crow never imagined he would live to see a day like today. The love of his life turned into an echo. The emptiness in his future overwhelming. Shan gave away her capacities to endure. He started back-tracking in time. Complexities of events. How did it come to this?

I am a vexed engineer: my ‘smoke encrypted whispers’ faded toward the obscurity of spectral encrypted echoes … Ghost-editing over old ground … Discovering that my words previously published were morphing into crawly-little arachnoids and flies, attacking one-another … All the shiny sentences I had orchestrated were like buttons on a favourite shirt

The poems entered into the overall national Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize were of an encouragingly high standard. At least a dozen strong poems did not make the list of Highly Commendeds (notably, ‘Skin 1968’; ‘The Woman I Am’; ’Henry’; and ‘Hear no, See no, Speak no Aboriginal’).

We invited four Australian poets to reflect on race in the world today and, specifically, on the ways that racism manifests in the intellectual and literary fields, particularly in poetry, where thought and representation are crystallised and magnified.

Cloud burst, and another sky falls. A blight of sun causes all feather to lose flavour in the wind. But our children will still have their mobile phones and dial the clouds