Poems by Vona Groarke

Between -


- the eye of one year and the mouth of the next
- air on two sides of one breath
- wind and window
                                                                               I would slip my right hand

- midnight and a second past
- the vase and glaze
- the print and printer’s ink
                                                                               I would slip my right hand

- the letters and the alphabet
- rainfall and rain
- grey of road and grey of sky
                                                                               I would slip my right hand

- now and then and here and now
- yes and no
- months and moons ago
                                                                               I would slip my right hand

- the lack and want of it
- the wind-down and get-go
- rest and restlessness
                                                                               I would slip my right hand

- I know and I don’t know
- patience and souvenir
- I am and what I am
                                                                               I would slip my right hand





The Blue Mountains, New South Wales


Winter, but you wouldn’t think it,
the kind with jonquils and lily of the valley,
a frilly darkness fussing round the clean edge

of daylight. I have given myself June
and with it, a year with two shortest days,
not much of a summer to speak of.

Yesterday, at the Winter Magic Festival,
a samba band followed the Hari Krishas
in a tie-dyed rumpus not a million miles

from what the cockatoos and lyrebirds
are up to in the gumtree. I walk past 
into an afternoon with a wall in it

and run my finger over the top 
to feel it hand up smooth, round hours,
stone after lacework stone.

It falls through me, the day, and no word 
of mine can snag or stall it. What matter. 
Under quilted hearts, I dream myself back

to the bowl of morning 
turned upside down,
light clattering out of it. 

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Vona Groarke has published seven collections of poetry with Gallery Press, the latest being Selected Poems, (2016). Her book-length essay on art frames, Four Sides Full, is due in October. Her poems have recently appeared in Yale Review, The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, The Guardian, Poetry and Poetry Review. Current Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and Selector for the Poetry Book Society (U.K.), she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester in the UK.

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