Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Four
November- December 2025
Fidelia, poems by Justin Lowe.
Fidelia
she sets down the candles each side of the platter
while the discussion continues uninterrupted.
she stands back on the edge of the ring of light
with tingling feet, she hears but does not listen.
so that later, when questioned, even under the screws,
she can honestly say she heard nothing.
word soon spreads of her devotion to her family,
to hushed talk whose words meant nothing to her,
other than that men sometimes treat her gently,
but that her hands are so mangled by the magistrates
that no-one has any more use for her,
turn her away with a few coins pressed to her scars.
Ninety-Nine
my father
would have turned 99
years old yesterday.
today
he is once again a few
scraps of paper in a drawer,
some
dusty photographs in cheap
frames hanging crooked on a wall.
I think
I can hear him groaning
at the very idea –
of the 99 years, I mean,
not the cheap frames or
the dust left to gather,
or
the official documents recording
his coming into the world,
or of his
marriage to my mother,
and then his leaving so quietly
in search of her.
a few scraps in a drawer
of a life lived
to the very end of it.
so much more
than the 99 years
he never made it to.
he can
roll his dead eyes all
he wants, but it is
a grave responsibility
being the sole curator of this
dusty museum full of such treasure,
all its trick mirrors and laughing clowns
with their sad cautionary tales,
and a bent coin behind each ear.
After the Asteroid
my dog and I are both creatures of habit.
that is how you get known in a place.
if you want to pass unnoticed
don’t get a dog like mine
don’t stand each morning
gazing out over the valley
across to the ancient ridgeline
and on clear days to a ridge beyond that
and so on to country beyond
the Gundungarra.
the sun breaks all molten from the stone
and lights the valley with song.
my dog cannot see what I see
and I cannot smell what she smells
but we can both hear the cockatoos
and the men hammering behind us
putting up a grand marquee for the tourists
to house some dinosaur exhibit.
there are dingos down in that valley
that have never set eyes on a white man
so vast is the expanse in space and time
unfolding at my feet.
the hammering stops for a while.
the first dinosaur is mounted and roars awake.
then stillness again.
just the ineffable murmur of the sun as it rises
and the screech of a single bird
like someone tearing out the pages of a book.
© Justin Lowe
Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where for 18 years he edited international poetry blog, Bluepepper. His ninth collection, “San Luis”, was released through Puncher&Wattmann in October 2024.