Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Today you are an ocean, poem by Tricia Dearborn.
Today you are an ocean
dashing yourself, wave by wave
onto rocks of reality
over and over, the smash
the roar
the reverberations
the rocks are implacable, unyielding
they are the usual types of ocean rocks
igneous
formed by volcanic eruptions and congealings
of sorrow, rage, despair
metamorphic
born of enormous intersecting forces,
contradictory pressures — outrage/terror,
loyalty/the need to speak
sedimentary
the accretion of what’s known, the gradual
acknowledgement of harm, the long slow
settling into belief
the waves shatter over and over
into rising jets of spume
disperse into rivulets and mist
while the ocean roars, unbroken
© Tricia Dearborn
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning poet, writer and editor. Her latest books of poetry are Autobiochemistry and She Reconsiders Life on the Run. Her work has been widely published in literary journals and in anthologies including Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry, The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, and Contemporary Australian Poetry. She has been guest poetry editor for various literary journals, including Cordite 112: TREAT (2024) and Rabbit 31: The Science Issue (2020), and a judge for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. She also writes fiction, and was the winner of the 2021 international Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. She is currently completing a new poetry collection with the support of a grant from Create NSW.