Thoughts and Prayers
for Kangaroo Island: Renewal

Today, as it begins, I need
to feel, to see, to fill my heart with green:
to breathe the soil-damp,
the breeze-swirl of fragrant oil,
to move among the soaring trunks
(some still blackened, strangely twisted),
my mulch-muffled footfall setting beat
to warbles, bugs-buzz and sudden bursts
of wing-whir in awakening bush;
to see the sun, in its softest mode,
caress the fringes of the mist with peach.

Around the burnt-out stumps I’ll find
The ’roos in casual concentration,
a loosely-swaddled joey,
legs stuck out beside its head,
craning down and nosing
for a taste of emerald dew.

But I keep returning to this tree –
that stood, once, in all its firm-fullness,
yet in a flash exploded from its base,
shot up and spun around,
to land beside the smouldering hearth
of its own jagged stump –

still remaining upright, held
in the embrace of its neighbour.

Sharon Foulkes has lived in Whyalla since 1989 and is currently a permanent relieving teacher based at Whyalla Town Primary School. She became serious about poetry in 2014, after an injury ended her hockey playing and she ran out of knitting wool. Her poems have appeared in the Whyalla Writers Group 2016 anthology ‘Where the Outback Meets the Sea’, and the Whyalla Writers Group & Port Augusta Writers anthologies ‘Recipes for Life’ and ‘One Small Step’. She won the Eyre Writers Group 2017 Tom Black Memorial Award, and was a Friendly Street Poets Poem of the Month recipient in 2016 and 2017. Her first full collection, ‘Finding Their Voices’, was one of the three successful entries for Friendly Street’s ‘New Poets 20’, published in 2019. More about Sharon and her work can be found here.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.