Poetry Winner — Ivy Ireland
Ivy Ireland is a poet who helps run a second-hand bookstore café in Newcastle, NSW. Ivy’s first book, Incidental Complications, was published in 2007 and her more recent collection, Porch Light, was published in 2015 with Puncher and Wattmann. Ivy completed her PhD at The University of Newcastle, where she has worked as a casual lecturer in Creative Writing. Ivy was awarded the Australian Young Poet Fellowship in 2007 and has won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize and the local section of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Ivy’s poems, essays and reviews have been published in Cordite, Overland, Going Down Swinging, Blue Dog, and various national and international magazines and anthologies.
Grey is not Your Colour
In this light, the sky is folded hand towels
in the inexpensive hotel lobby:
neutral grey. Speckled egg shell.
Like this all day, as though
the cloud-towels are close: they will
fall off the God-shelf, right onto, in particular,
your head. Whose fault will that be?
After all, you are ruining this day by driving too fast.
And too far. Just to escape the oppression.
Of thoughts, sure, and of more than that:
of the held-back heart. It is unfair to say
you can’t be told what to do. You had planned to
exit the vehicle, wander the wild places,
leave something important behind there. Yet
every turn-off seems to circle you around
back to beckoning highways, endless broken
white lines. Most times, you can follow instructions
to a tee, but with every infinitesimal beat of this
inferior replacement heart – the one you
popped in like you were prompted to
when your own tender core got too
unruly – something glorious and expansive
dies. This is criminal, worse than your driving.
And so. Instead of burying it out there under ironwood,
you must grab your own wild heart in your wicked fist
and shove it back in. This will not be easy,
considering the weather and the fact that you
gouged it out with the shaft of a wedge-tailed eagle feather.
Yet you must make your beat-machine work again. Not for
petty notions of quashed love, but for others who will see
grit glowing through the grey towel clouds. And follow along.
in the inexpensive hotel lobby:
neutral grey. Speckled egg shell.
Like this all day, as though
the cloud-towels are close: they will
fall off the God-shelf, right onto, in particular,
your head. Whose fault will that be?
After all, you are ruining this day by driving too fast.
And too far. Just to escape the oppression.
Of thoughts, sure, and of more than that:
of the held-back heart. It is unfair to say
you can’t be told what to do. You had planned to
exit the vehicle, wander the wild places,
leave something important behind there. Yet
every turn-off seems to circle you around
back to beckoning highways, endless broken
white lines. Most times, you can follow instructions
to a tee, but with every infinitesimal beat of this
inferior replacement heart – the one you
popped in like you were prompted to
when your own tender core got too
unruly – something glorious and expansive
dies. This is criminal, worse than your driving.
And so. Instead of burying it out there under ironwood,
you must grab your own wild heart in your wicked fist
and shove it back in. This will not be easy,
considering the weather and the fact that you
gouged it out with the shaft of a wedge-tailed eagle feather.
Yet you must make your beat-machine work again. Not for
petty notions of quashed love, but for others who will see
grit glowing through the grey towel clouds. And follow along.
