Sarah Day

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Sarah Day Poems

1.

I think I’ve been waiting for you all my life.
To glimpse you through the kitchen window
scratching between iris and daffodil,
disrupting roots, sprawling moll-like
...

The rattle of wind in sclerophyll
is the murmur of cosmic dust
and particle shift. With each break
in the clouds the queue shuffles
...

Things fall apart. Across a summer sky
the emblematic Coca Cola script
above the uproar, miles long, a mile high
...

The wombat lay, full length,
as long as a big dog, but thicker set,
a mass of weight and muscle.
Soft still, his bulk gave but didn’t shift.
...

Sarah Day Biography

Sarah Day was born in England and grew up in Tasmania, Australia. Grass Notes (Brandl & Schlesinger 2009) is her most recent collection. The Ship (Brandl & Schlesinger 2004) won the University of Melbourne Wesley Michel Wright Prize 2004, the Queensland Premier’s Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry 2005 and was joint winner of the ACT Art & Literary Awards’ Judith Wright Prize with Joanne Burns. In 2002 her New and Selected Poems was published by Arc in UK where it received a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society. It was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards. Before that, Quickening (Penguin Books Australia Ltd.) was published in 1997. Her other books include A Hunger to be Less Serious which won the Anne Elder Award for a first volume of poetry in 1987 and A Madder Dance which was shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Awards. She has received grants from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council and Arts Tasmania and was resident at the BR Whiting Library in Rome in 1993. She was invited to the Festival de Poesie in Paris in 2001 and 2004 and has been a guest at Australian festivals including Adelaide, Melbourne, Mildura, Byron Bay, Brisbane and Hobart writers festivals and at King’s Lynn in England. In 2011 she read at a symposium on Australian literature and culture at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her poems have been put to music by British composers Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb. She was poetry editor of Island Magazine for seven years. She lives in Hobart, Tasmania with her husband and two daughters. She has taught English and Creative Writing for a number of years at university and year 12 level. She has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.)

The Best Poem Of Sarah Day

Hens

I think I’ve been waiting for you all my life.
To glimpse you through the kitchen window
scratching between iris and daffodil,
disrupting roots, sprawling moll-like
in a patch of sun, wings spread flush
with the ground, a coquettish leg
in the air and rolling lascivious eye.
You’re disruptive of course –
annuals, seedlings go by the wayside,
Christmas lilies cordoned off,
brassicas like khaki interns on parade –
but what small price
for that vigorous rustling
as mulch scatters from under hedges,
to have you beady at my side
grabbing worms as I pull up buttercups;
or whetting your beaks on the path, this side
that side, like good chefs sharpening knives.
I love the way you pose like weathervanes
on the axe handle,
to watch as I wash dishes
how today’s menu, or tonic
is borage or bindweed or dock
that you will strip back
to a handful of cellulose spikes.
The way you share a laying box
when there is one for each of you
and midwife one another
through your confinements.
The way you lay eggs –
those warm white ellipses
on the straw.
Somehow for all the wreckage
the garden was never more alive.
You offer a remote conviviality
that I don’t presume upon
as I would, say, a dog or cat,
I’m afraid it’s species that I’m celebrating here,
not personality,
that atavistic sense of well-being you provoke
you unremarkably remarkable hens.
I’m grateful, watching you just now
splashing about in dust
for that reassurance you give,
of simple notions, like goodness.

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