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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Special Australian Edition August 2023
Little Cove, poem by Ella Jeffery.
Little Cove
I am always going back to Little Cove.
Two weeks, the Pacific splayed
in the hotel window, winding mindlessly
over the rocks. Every day planes slooped
through the fresh crush of sky
against whitefinned ocean, came closer,
seemed to be veering down. The huge
sound scoured my mind. All night I held
still. Through the wall a woman’s
strange laugh chinked the dark.
Now, in this rainy house, I hear a plane
overhead and my mind capsizses
back to the room where I was always
almost crushed in the wreckage
of that white room – how the others
could go on eating chicken and chips
or washing sand from their feet
in the bathtub, not minding that every day
we came so close, we came so close
and survived.
© Ella Jeffery
Ella Jeffery is a poet, editor and critic. Her debut collection of poems, Dead Bolt, won the Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and the Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems, HEAT, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Island and Southerly. She is the recipient of a Queensland Writers Fellowship, the Mick Dark Fellowship for Environmental Writing, and the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. She lives in Brisbane.