Margie Cronin

Margie Cronin Poems

Margie Cronin Biography

Margie Cronin, who writes under the name MTC Cronin, was born in Merriwa, New South Wales, in 1963, and grew up at Caloundra, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Following school she went on to the University of Queensland, studying Arts/Law, with a double major in political science. She has also studied at the University of New South Wales, the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of Sydney. Through most of the 1990s she worked in the field of law, but during this time she also began to establish herself as a poet. More recently, she taught creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, and worked on a doctoral thesis exploring the intersections of law and literature. She currently lives on an organic farm in Maleny, Queensland, with her partner and three children. Cronin began publishing her poetry in the early 1990s, and her work has since appeared in a wide range of Australian and international poetry magazines and literary journals. She published her first collection, Zoetrope: We See Us Moving, in 1995, and has gone on to publish a dozen further collections, in Australia, the UK and the USA. A prolific poet, she has worked within lyric traditions as well as in the prose poem, and in more innovative forms such as that of her long poem More or Less Than 1–100, which won the Victorian Premier’s C. J. Dennis Prize for Poetry (2005) and the South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing (2006). She has also published a volume of critical essays based on her doctoral work, Squeezing Desire Through a Sieve: Micro Essays on Judgement and Justice (2009).)

The Best Poem Of Margie Cronin

Seven Mysterious Songs I: Belonging

for P.B.


‘I am looking for sunlight’

I saw your world begin
A night of dawns
Time kept coming round to that
Our reception of the light
The silence of the sun
As it crept spectacularly
Towards us

When I saw how it revealed you
My own paths curved
To find the circle
They had once been

Words here are simply sighs
The hums and satisfactions of animals
Click in the back of my throat
That might be the cricket or cicada
In Summer ventriloquy
Or the snake becoming new
Over the friendly rock

It has become simple for me
To think of these things now
That the idea of the fragment
Has given its secrets
To the whole

The leaves which feared separation
Fell
And the water telling and retelling
Itself passes by the place of this event
Only to pass again
The sky with that big voice saved
For the moments its own story is known
Whispers
The earth:

Come on little bird
The trees are holding you up
Come possum
With your hearty feet leaving prints
On the porcelain roofs of dreams
Come grains
And mountains, lakes, orchards
Leave your importance
And follow these clouds
To where they have no meaning

Turtle
Are you coming
With your knowledge of origins and regret?
Children, bring the hearts
Of forests
And the abilities of the sand

We’ll walk over that hill
Where the path curves out of sight
Do not rush
It is not the future ahead of us
But a slow becoming
Time weaves itself
Into the very swing of your arms
That space left
Where you lift your foot

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