Samuel Wagan Watson Poems

For Anthony Lawrence
A large gray jumped, what I can only imagine is a dingo fence last night and made it at least 5 feet off the ground, under a full moon a million miles away,
...

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.
 — Leonardo da Vinci
...

got up off the couch
and immediately the room cleared of its winged creatures
flapping in-time
to an abdominal exercise machine on the glowing box,
...

my Dad straightened out the crooked men
in the old laundry shed
above the fishing gear and jars of nuts and bolts
where on a rack
...

dropping a knife
on one's foot
is nothing like
dropping tequilla
...

you'd never forget the pelicans
because it was their home too
and that occasional one who'd try and swallow your baited hook
while we cast out into an endless mould of brown and blue skin
...

the pyromaniacs of the gods were kicking it
into that desert sunset
upon a fire pink, burner-blue horizon line
blossoms cherry red
...

for David Gilbey

fire-engine flash of fox pelt
and a plume of tail
...

I remember construction cranes like herds of frozen praying-mantis, high on the steamy Bjelke-Petersen plateau above a brown snake-coiled river. It was from this view, at the age of 4, that I learnt to read the columns of Brisbane city.
...

Sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind
Is early childhood and black humour
White stucco dreaming
...