2011 winner

Several Ways to Fall Out of the Sky

Forget to take your wings from where they hang in the hall, the brass hook
silent as a question mark beneath silver feathers.

Remember to collect your wings, having noticed the post-it note on the bench
that says ‘wings’. But, in your haste to take flight, forget to fasten their buckles.

Become mesmerised by the sun, bigger now than the world below.
Forget to flap.

Ignore any doubts about low-flying above a somnolent bay where a ploughman
works doggedly on in furrows of soil, and Daedalus calls out your name.

Lose faith in the universe, the laws of physics, the invention of flight.
Forget to breathe.

Consider the way gravity swings the planets round, pulls tides up shores,
draws blood from women.

Discover profiles of loved ones in the clouds - your mother with her back
half-turned, your daughter dissolving as you wing towards her.

Remember unwashed clothes, wisdom not yet taught to kids, pets gone
hungry, the goldfish, the goldfish…

Be totally unable to remember the author of The Grapes of Wrath; only that
the Japanese translation was The Angry Raisins.

Find remorse weighing heavier on your shoulders than wings.

Fly into the flight path of pelicans that peck at your hair for their nests –
which throws you right out.

Crash into Mt Sugarloaf, graceless as a kettle crash-landing the moon.

Seek out the floor of heaven, the face of God.

Soar too high in winter. Feel ice freeze your wings over, as it does to all other
high-fliers: winged horses, ghost ships, over-ambitious angels.

Fall asleep in the air. Remember this: no one knows who you are.

         
by Lisa A. Jacobson

 

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Lisa A. Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, is currently in press and will be published in May 2012 by Five Islands Press. This manuscript was short-listed for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press, 1995) was short-listed for the National Book Council Awards. She recently received Australia Council funding to complete her next collection, South in the World.

Lisa Jacobson holds a PhD from La Trobe’s creative writing program. Her work has been published in Australia, New York and London. She has won the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Award and was a recipient of The Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry. Her poetry is represented in The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, edited by Peter Porter (1996) and The Best Australian Poems 2010, edited by Robert Adamson (Black Inc.). Her poem, “Girls and Horses in the Fire” was featured in The Age’s special edition on the Victorian bushfires (Feb, 2009) and selected as the epigraph for the highly acclaimed Kinglake 350 by Adrian Hyland (Text, 2012). She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter.

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