David Adès - Kettle - Live Encounters

Ades LE P&W Vol 2 Nov-Dec 2026

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026.

Kettle, poems by David Adès.

Kettle

for Andrew B and Andrew T

After a long day in the vineyard,
down on our knees and up again,

picking every last bunch of grapes
we could find, feeling the slow

burn of tired muscles,
Andrew and Andrew and I

sat around our kitchen table
for fifteen minutes, waiting

for the kettle to boil,
time passing in a slow doze

of conversation, the candle
of our words guttering out,

waiting while a blanket of exhaustion
draped itself over us,

our thoughts becoming sludge,
none of us noticing

as the minutes ticked away,
that we hadn’t turned the kettle on.

Writing a Poem About Old Geezers

for the class of 1973

Old geezers don’t lie. In a room full of old geezers,

grey-haired or bald, heavy-jowled, well-girthed,

the gig is up: it is no longer possible to deny one’s own geezer-hood,

to maintain that the mirror and camera lie,

that your robust vitality is as robust as you think it is.

But the boys in these geezer faces,

the ones preserved in the amber of your memories,

are still recognisably present, which fills you

with an inordinate and incomprehensible joy,

and when they recount, in three-minute turns,

their defeats and failures, their successes

and achievements, like time-lapse photography

bearing witness to unpredicted, brimming lives,

an ease spreads through the warming air of the room,

the geezers breathe in the oxygen of one another

and become light-headed, jolly, drunk with their

transformation from boys into men, the rich,

thick, books of their lives, and the triumph,

the unexpected, intoxicating triumph of their survival,

to meet again, like this, after fifty years.

The Parade, Norwood

In memory of Colette Levy

After the funeral,

after another tent peg went flying

from the tent of love

that sheltered me all these years,

I visited a decades old stomping ground

to find some things unchanged —

forgotten haunts, old cafes, bookshops,

footpaths — and others transformed

from I don’t remember what

to something strangely foreign

as if, in those places where memory pulsed,

I was viewing a stuttering hologram

of my former life, disturbingly visible

and yet intangible, out of reach,

like both the person who lived it, and the other,

who was there from the beginning

and is now gone.

David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, Afloat in Light and the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal. His latest collections are The Heart’s Lush Gardens (Flying Island Books 2024), A Blink of Time’s Eye (Five Islands Press 2025) and the chapbook The Toolmaker and Other Poems (Walleah Press 2025). David won the Wirra Wirra Vineyards Short Story Prize 2005 and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2014. Mapping the World was commended for the FAW Anne Elder Award 2008. David’s poems have been read on the Australian radio poetry program Poetica and have also featured on the U.S. radio poetry program Prosody. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and twice been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. His poems have been Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, a finalist in the Dora and Alexander Raynes Poetry Prize (U.S.) and commended for the Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel). David is the host of the monthly poetry podcast series “Poets’ Corner” which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb8bHCZBRMBjlWlPDeaSanZ3qAZcuVW7N. He lives in Sydney with his wife and three children.

David Adès – Kettle

Kettle

Writing a Poem About Old Geezers

The Parade, Norwood

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