Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2021
Special edition featuring poets from Australia & New Zealand.
Ben Hession is a writer based in Wollongong, New South Wales. His poetry has been published in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, the Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, the Mascara Literary Review, Bluepepper, the Marrickville Pause, The Blue Nib and the Don Bank Live Poets anthology Can I Tell You A Secret? He has reviewed poetry for Verity La and the Mascara Literary Review. Ben Hession is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
November 2019
A tannin sky filters a grief over the city,
housing markets, title deeds escape into fiery winds,
and black leaves shower doleful answers onto streets,
yards of heimat, quotidian quarter acres, ordinary
mansions of suburban sprawls, their white skins
bare as dissonant witnesses. What use are their thoughts
and prayers? The motoring roads, once confirming
complete conquest, now no longer remember us, now
run into unknown territories like agonized nerves,
as an unnatural season confronts us with its radiant heat.
It is only spring and generations of so-called peaceful
settlement are consumed by parched, rasping clouds
that darken the day prematurely, without time for lament,
bringing us to burn by sights of Gaia’s calm judgement.
© Ben Hession