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Melaleuca

Number 48: June 2013 Editor: Phillip A. Ellis

Table of Contents

Nicholaos Floratos Morphling 3

Jeremy Gadd Bird Songs 4

Jeremy Gadd Capella Romana 5

Tiggy Johnson Mamie 7

Tiggy Johnson My First Bedroom 8

Max Merckenschlager Rainforest Fungi at Night 9

Luke Whitington A peacock in his garden 10

All works are copyright by their respective creators, 2013; the arrangement of this collection is

copyright by Phillip A. Ellis, 2013.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works2.5 Australia License .

You are free to make and pass along copies, so long as you do not charge money or goods for the

copy, and as long as this and other issues remain intact.

Submission guidelines: email 2-5 poems, any length, any style, any genre to

phillip@phillipaellis.com in the body of a single RTF or DOC attachment. No bios are needed;

cover letters are welcome. We accept previously published material and simultaneous submissions;

if work is published prior to its appearance in Melaleuca you must advise us accordingly, so that

proper attribution can be made.

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Morphling

The air is filled with spoilt syllables and cheap juice.

On the page, you draw the ten stars overhead. Their perseverance

Astounds you. They greet us and begin to splinter. You find it right

That the moon and four thin birds should sit by them

Like pale ornaments drawn in your black pen. It is all so simple.

You know the names of two of these things. Your images

Are footsteps. The paper is hard and cold

But it is the key to a dark lexicon. You are sticky

From the six lollies you dabbled over. Your picture is black

And beautiful like boiled leather. This page is much too small.

You reconfigure the night into a white field littered

With black confetti and one particular star holds itself

In your eye and asks for a name. You mull over the sounds

Of every color you know. You say none correctly.You slowly learn that lollies and pictures are the smallest things in the world.

Your eyes are dark and full.

Nicholaos Floratos

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Bird Songs

Outside hospitals, homes and hospices,

the incessant cycle of seasons persists,

bringing deluge or desert but indifferent

to every imaginable human indisposition,

unreasonableness, tort and imposition.While dilettantes discuss Michelangelo,

and UN delegates decide war or no,

synchronous with the ruining of relationships

that connect and mesh humanity, birds

perched on twigs or rusting steel rods protruding

from crumbling reinforced concrete exult

in their existence outside cells, wards,

inner-city studios and writers unwashed windows:

their songs a balm for the sad, sick and sentenced.

Jeremy Gadd

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Capella Romana

Constantinoples gates guarded

the legacy of Pericles, Plato, Christ and

the dominating dome of Hagia Sophia

for nearly nine hundred years before falling

to Frankish profiteers to finance their sea voyage home.

Instead of contesting

as the Pope planned

the Infidel in the Holy land,

Christians killed Christians at the

blind Doges vengeful command.

Slaughter and looting were the orders

of the day as Crusaders sold their souls

to pay Venetians for the fare

of shipping them to Outremer even though they never arrived there.

Black smoke billowed above

the Golden Horn while, below,

triumphant trumpets stridently

warned the inhabitants they were

at the mercy of brute brawn.

Byzantine Greeks violated and hacked;

a civilisation put to the sword and sacked;

exquisite altar crosses never seen again;

delicate jewellery snatched by coarse men

who should have been fighting the Saracen.

Precious glass and enamel lay liquefying

in the flames; helpless monks and nuns

wrung their hands in fear and shame

as the soldiers singing blades

slashed, decapitated and maimed.

Obelisks toppled onto the streets;sculptures cracked and shattered

in the heat; figurines and icons

of the Virgin and saints destroyed

for their gold leaf and gilded paint;

art melted down to coin money.

Nicetas, the historian, watched in a daze

as relics of Rome and Christendom,

including busts commissioned by Augustus,

were thrown into the furnaces blaze,

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Fragments of the True Cross stolen and

forever lost; the cost to the future, incalculable loss.

In burning libraries and palace corridors

charred manuscripts, irreplaceable scrolls,

smouldered on the emperors mosaic floors.

In the desecrated churchesthe floor tiles were stained red

where the ravaged and the wounded

moaned among the dead.

Weakened by war between successor states,

by plague, poverty and religious hate,

two centuries later eastern Rome fell

to Mehmed the Greats Turkish cannon

and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

Jeremy Gadd

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Mamie

When I sort the photos

and postcards you sent

read your words

feel you missing her

across seas,your warmth

laugh,

fear to ask

to visit,

the chance to meet again,

its like I know you.

And I think to pick up

the phone, call,

ask you to fill the gaps

whos who,

whos shebut before I stand

I remember

you died thirty years

before

I ever heard your name.

Tiggy Johnson

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My first bedroom

The sash window and the filled-in fireplace were my favourite things. The window was almost

always open and, despite the constant passing of four lanes of traffic, it was somehow peaceful.

Perhaps it was the magnolia separating me from the cars. Not that I kept it open overnight. Often. I

wrote my first stories in that room, literally and figuratively, and take myself back sometimes when

I should be sleeping. I hated the way the door never closed properly: Id hang an old pair ofswimmers on the inside handle, loop them around the knob on the outside and back again, so it

would jam closed, the closest to privacy I had. I liked it closed, and when storming through a

teenage rage, and once slammed it against my brothers head after he snuck in on all fours to

surprise and cheer me one particularly grey afternoon. I spent many hours redecorating that room.

My bed must have moved to every possible position except in front of the door, and once I used

drawers to break the space into two, though I dont recall why. Maybe to hide the mess from my

mother quickly if she stuck her head inside the door, or came to collect my laundry basket. It was so

cold Id often dress beneath the blankets during winter and loathed the high ceilings at the same

time as loving them. I lost my virginity in that room, not knowing it was some big deal of a thing to

lose, unlike moving out of it after Id finally been allowed to paint it pink.

Tiggy Johnson

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Rainforest Fungi at Dusk

Lake Allom, Fraser Island

A laggard lance of light,

a flaccid lumen strand, a soaked spaghetti,

expelled from oceans resting on the canopy,

extruded through the press of forest branches,exhausted as it fell like crashing feathers,

now lit a tiny showcase in its bath.

In session run till night,

for close-of-day performance to the gallery,

an audience was simply immaterial;

a matinee for none, or many hundreds.

The artist with self-gratifying needs

displayed her gem beside Lake Allom's path.

Max MerckenschlagerOriginal appearance: Captured Moments (Ginninderra Press)

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