Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 198 Autumn 2010 · Writing / Main Posts Your Sea Stuart Cooke You’d say this grass is a slab of light green sea and the myriad white flowers scattered through it the tips of waves whipped up by the wind, or it might have snowed with these flowers, most of which have now melted on a warm, grassy bed. These are your modes, in which varieties are crystallised into drops of perception. My poems begin as surrealist mess, you say, which my conscious mind refines into sense. It’s your world talk. We are specks of pollen floating; your poems trace the outline of two at the moment of their collision (and their gentle parting is the closing of the poem’s mouth). You weave webs of wispy glass, thin fingers of light set against backdrops of heavier material clusters: what we all see but never speak. This poem, then, is a return to the sight of the already spoken. Stuart Cooke Stuart Cooke’s latest chapbook, Departure into Cloud, was published by Vagabond Press in 2013. His full-length collection is Edge Music (IP, 2011). He is a lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University on the Gold Coast. More by Stuart Cooke › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 11 December 202411 December 2024 · Writing The trouble Ken Bolton’s poems make for me, specifically, at the moment Linda Marie Walker These poems doom me to my chair and table and computer. I knew it was all downhill from here, at this age, but it’s been confirmed. My mind remains town-size, hemmed in by pine plantations and kanite walls and flat swampy land and hills called “mountains”. 4 October 202418 October 2024 · Main Posts Announcing the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers 2024 longlist Editorial Team Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, established in 2014 and now in its ninth year, recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia.