Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
Bush Music, poems by Brenda Saunders.
Bush Music
I listen to the lilt, the rise and fall around me.
Each leaf holds a note, each shadow a rest
in this sound-scape intimate yet vast.
Beneath the seeming stillness tiny creatures
tinkle in a microcosmos, well out of sight.
Every moment a heartbeat flickers into life.
At each turn, the forest teems with sound.
I hear the crackle of heat on dry leaves —
red ants in a line of staccato dots.
A breeze rushes through, soft shuffles
high in the canopy, branch to branch.
Emu grass shimmers a light glissando.
Trees reach out to each other, share
a song of their own. Some cry in distress,
others send healing along spreading roots.
I walk at a steady pace, keeping time.
Hear the beat echo under my feet —
my tread deep as a bass drum sounding.
Smoke
For weeks now the gauze sky stretches white, holds the smell of fire. Lost
in the haze, streets are strangely silent. There is no wind. Day and night
our houses fill with smoke. It searches for cracks, gaps in the skirting.
Doors once open to a summer breeze barred against it. Everywhere, a hint
of gum leaves lingers, the scent of a campfire trapped indoors. Blackened
embers line our windowsills. Unseen, lighter than air, the distant fire floats
freely among us. Every breath leaves us light headed. Smoke catches in our
throats, settles inside, a living part of us.
In the time before the forced forgetting, we breathed freely. Moved keenly,
alive to change. Knew the meaning of every scent carried on the wind. The
time to move, the time to stay. We carried firesticks with us to heal the
land. The right time for burning passed down in stories. After morning
rain, the grass tall, ready for smoking.
© Brenda Saunders
Brenda is Wiradjuri writer living in Katoomba NSW. She has published three poetry collections and two chapbooks. Her poetry and literary reviews appear in national journals and anthologies including Westerly Issue 64.1, 65.1 and 68.1 westerlymag.com.au, Southerly Vol 77.1 and 78.3 southerlyjournal.com.au. Best Australian Poems 2013 and 2015 www.blackincbooks.com.au, Best of Australian Poems 2022 www.australianpoetry.com, Best Australian Science Writing 2019 www.unsw.press.com, Best Australian Prose Poems 2023 www.mup.com. Going Down Swinging 2023 www.goingdownswinging.org.au, and the Joanne Burns Award Anthology 2013, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2024 (Prose Poems) www.spinelesswonders@shortaustralianstories.com. Brenda has also won several prizes and fellowships including the 2014 Scanlon Book Prize (australianpoetry.com) for ‘Looking for Bullin Bullin’, hybridpublishers.com.au, the 2016 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize, queenslandpoetry.org and in 2018 the Joanne Burns Award spinelesswonders@shortaustralianstories.com. She is currently writing a collection of prose poems and memoirs.