Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
Ritual Doorway, poem by Patricia Sykes.
Ritual Doorway
When I lay my head
on my tired pillow
this winter solstice
I will think
as I do each year
of the multitudes
sinking likewise
into the softs of peace
or the hards of duress
the trials born into
the ones chosen
the ones inflicted
Today winter’s media
is at full capacity
loud with an
announcement
of death, the end
of a friend’s
disabling blindness,
deafness, her
latest fall
the killer who
broke her ribs
and punctured
her lung, no surgery
she said, her son
weeping in my arms
as he told of her final
“I love you”, her gift
his forever pillow.
© Patricia Sykes
Patricia Sykes is a poet and librettist. Her poems and collections have received various awards, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, John Shaw Neilson award and the Tom Howard Poetry Prize. She has read her work widely and it has featured on ABC radio programs Poetica and The Spirit of Things. Her collaborations with composer Liza Lim have been performed in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, Germany, Russia, New York and the UK. She was Asialink Writer in Residence, Malaysia, 2006. A selection of her poems was published in an English/Chinese edition by Flying Island Books in 2017. A song cycle composed by Andrew Aronowicz, based on her collection The Abbotsford Mysteries, premiered at The Abbotsford Convent Melbourne — now an arts precinct — in 2019. A podcast of this work is available on various platforms.