Clockwork


Dawn, and two stars hang beside a daylight moon.
The pendulum shifts, and I can almost guess
the time by the light. The potted magnolia on the
balcony gives it, the light and dark of its leaves.

The ghost gums at the edge of the path throw down
shadows onto the loden field. Under the smoke
and ash coloured bark the gums are rife with
incarnate lives, regenerate deaths, petite remains.

At the root of the conifers, hardened spur-sharp
branches lay in a stack and become a nesting
ground, a harvest of tiny worlds. An abundance.
The wind here is a current of pollen and spore,

fodder for the germinant dust. So too the elaborate
entrails of earth; seed-sprout, weed and bloom,
wind-tossed flowerheads and manifest wings.
The thread of the seasons is a yarn of ruin and

renewal, ruin and renewal. A clockwork of dead
wood and surrogate shoots, a lineage. The knotted
stem in a common root, or the course the sun takes
on its passage to dusk, the one under selfsame stars.

Todd Turner

Todd Turner lives and works in Sydney. He was shortlisted for the 2011 Blake Poetry Prize and in 2010 for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. He is currently working on a manuscript for his first collection of poetry.

More by Todd Turner ›

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