In Blackwater woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.


Mary Oliver
​

Selected by Professor Ratcliffe as a poem to support and in honour of, first responders five years or so ago during Covid.  How apt, how meaningful is this poem in this context ...  (Bev Lee

A bitter, anti-pastoral protest against Patrick Kavanagh's hometown environment in Monaghan. He laments how the land and peasant upbringing "burgled [his] bank of youth" and crushed his artistic spirit. The poem was written in October 1940 and was later published in his 1947 collection A Soul for Sale. Kavanagh was born 21 October 1904, Inniskeen, Ireland and died 30 November 1967 (age 63 years), Dublin, Ireland

Protest poetry ... awareness raising and community development ...

Found in a Facebook Post from the UK.... 

Bev Lee

Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.
​

Punishment
 
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
 
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
 
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
 
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
 
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
 
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
 
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
 
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
 
of your brains exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
 
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
 
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

"In a victory speech that leaned as much on tone as triumph, Malinauskas reached beyond his base, invoking the bush ethos of Henry Lawson’s poem The Duty of Australians to frame his appeal for unity" ....

'The Duty of Australians' 

‘Tis the duty of Australians, in the bush and in the town,
To forever praise their country, but to run no other down…
When a man, or nation, visits in the heyday of his pride,
‘Tis the duty of Australians to be kind but dignified…

‘Tis our duty to the stranger—landed, maybe, but an hour--
To give all the information and assistance in our power,
To give audience to the new chum and to let the old chums wait,
Lest his memory be embittered by his first days in the State.

‘Tis our duty, when he’s foreign, and his English very young,
To find out and take him somewhere where he’ll hear his native tongue.
To give him our spare moment, and our pleasure to defer--
He’ll be a father of Australians, as our foreign fathers were!

Henry Lawson
​c 1926

Poetry found in blog post - theothercheek.com.au/welcoming-the-new-chum-quoting-henry-lawson-peter-malinauskas-reframes-patriotism/

​Bev  Lee 
​March 2026

Vivian Garner -  'Loneliness'

they say you get used to it
you do

they think that makes it better
it doesn’t

it makes them feel better ––
you stop complaining


​Vivian Garner

Social Alternatives
82 Social Alternatives Vol. 41 No. 1, 2022

​A house,
comfortable and beautifully sequestered
with a garden, cats, cigarettes, dill pickles and gin.
Will it be home?
Can I make a home with myself?
Will it be home?
Dreams snagging and tangling my better judgement
because I know
over and over,
so well, so plaintively
once there was a way to get back home, once.
​
By Kate Jennings

Judy Durrant, 'And Day Breaks'

Lamisse Hamouda, 'Instead of ADHD'

This poem intrigues me.  I recognise that the poet, Lamisse Hamouda, is using poetry to  externalise a difficult experience ... a process I became aware of as a narrative therapy counselling approach as a social worker. I discover Lamisse is a narrative therapist and enjoy listening to her reflections on drawing on her understanding and use of the narrative therapy approach of externalisation in writing it.

Maxine Beneba Clarke -'Seed'

'Beautiful Changeling' - reading by Maxine Beneba Clarke
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/line-break/line-break-poetry-maxine-beneba-clarke/106665254

'Women's Work' Victorian Women's Trust 'Women's Work'
https://www.vwt.org.au/womens-work/

Excerpt of Women's Work here ... https://womenswork.com.au/blogs/a-seat-at-the-table/a-mothers-day-tribute

​Maggie Breen
 
Maggie Breen was born in Wexford in 1979. She lives in Dingle, Co. Kerry. Her debut collection of poetry, Other Things I Didn't Tell, was published in 2013. She was long-listed for the Fish Poetry Prize in 2015.
Maggie admires the following ​poets, Paula Meehan, Mary O'Donnell, Leanne O'Sullivan.

Journey

Mary O’Donnell
​
​Poet and novelist Mary O’Donnell was born in County Monaghan in 1954 and studied German and philosophy at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. O’Donnell is recognized as a leading figure in the generation of Irish women writers who began publishing in the 1980s and 1990s; her work is often cited as key in expanding the horizons of Ireland’s traditionally male-dominated literary world. She currently teaches poetry at Galway University.
Mary O’Donnell’s first three collections were published by Salmon, two of which were nominated for Irish Times Literature awards. Her most recent collection of poetry is Those April Fevers (Ark UK, 2015). She has also published four novels and two collections of short stories. Fiction and poetry have been widely published.

YouTube @1.38min
​
The Men I Once Knew
by Mary O'Donnell 

The men I once knew offered gifts,
like male penguins offering stones to a female
in the competition for courtship.
One offered a bag of lemons, bright and shiny,
still warm from the Mediterranean garden
where he plucked them. Another took me 
on a boat. It had no life-jackets. We sailed
dangerously and I was sea-sick for days.
It’s no problem, he said, just watch the horizon.
The third kept painting me, Botticelli’s Venus,
he murmured, digging his brush
to the canvas, failing each time to find the line
that would match the line of my thigh.

Lemons. Life-jacket. My thigh.
We failed calamitously, we failed gloriously 
too, and even now on any day, 
I can’t say I ever felt ruined
by their attentions. 
It was how we passed the time, 
pleasantly.

Paula Meehan
 
Paula Meehan was born in Dublin in 1955, the eldest of six children. She subsequently moved to London with her parents.
She began her secondary education at St. Michael's Holy Faith Convent in Finglas but was expelled for organising a protest march against the regime of the school. She studied for her Intermediate Certificate on her own and then went to Whitehall House Senior College, a vocational school, to study for her leaving certificate.
At Trinity College, Dublin, (1972–1977) she studied English, History and Classical Civilization, taking five years to complete her Bachelor of Arts degree. This included one year off, spent travelling through Europe. While a student she was involved in street theatre and various kinds of performance.
​
In September 2013, Meehan was installed as the Ireland Professor of Poetry by President Michael D. Higgins.


Hannah, Grandmother

Hannah, Grandmother
 
Coldest day yet of November
her voice close in my ear--
tell them priests nothing.
Was I twelve? Thirteen?
Filthy minded.
Keep your sins to yourself.
Don't be giving them a thrill.
Dirty oul feckers.
As close as she came to the birds and the bees.
on her knees in front of the Madonna,
Our Lady of the Facts of Life
beside the confessional--
oak door closing like a coffin lid
neatly carpentered
waxed and buffed.
In the well made box of this poem
her voice dies.
She closes her eyes
and lowers her brow to her joined hands.
Prays hard:
woman to woman.