Pratik : From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Anne Casey's new poem, "Midstory"

Thursday, October 1, 2020

From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Anne Casey's new poem, "Midstory"

ANNE CASEY

Midstory

A babel of lorikeets

tears me from the page

(ironically paper-bound)

where—while watching her

baby daughter—the poet is trying

to grow a tree by not looking

at her iPhone; a clatter

of wattle birds

clamours nearby for top spot,

the highest surfing

the teeter-totter as would-be

usurpers swoop and rush.

A flurry of miners

lancing through—

a dog barking somewhere down

below in the gully, not mine

who is sitting up beside me

adrift in our treetop bower

sniffing the late afternoon

faux-autumn air

for answers

to unasked questions,

my sons’ voices rising

from the neighbour’s garden

as I take up my iPhone

to grow a small poem.

(Written while reading ‘Landscape with iPhone’ by Emily Mohn-State in New Ohio Review, Issue 25 2019.)

Anne Casey has worked for 30 years as a journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Her poetry ranks in The Irish Times Most-Read and is widely published internationally—The Irish Times, Entropy, apt, Murmur House, Quiddity, Barzakh, FourXFour, Cordite, The Canberra Times and Plumwood Mountain among others. She is Senior Poetry Editor of Other Terrain Journal and Backstory Journal (Swinburne University, Melbourne) and a member of several literary editorial boards.