Three Poems by Amanda Anastasi

original thought

a
floorless
space

without
beginning
or end

arriving
but never
landing

attaining
and never
grasping

soaring
inquisitive

through
unlocked
lands

travelling
luminous

2012

Notes From A Non-Human Observer

i

I scanned the streets for traces of the living,
searched for a saviour but found the dust of
a prior zest, the half-closed shutters of faces

an impoverished expectation – singularly,
they are travelling fragments, functional only
to the whole of workplace and family

their presence an unfinished sentence; others
are shut to themselves, enslaved to a will
not their own, masquerading as free people

yet with every second, each comes closer
to complete frankness; their facades, little by little,
emptied of their polish and concord;

some – very few, are walking portals
receptive to the promise in all that pass –
it is for these rarities that I pause

ii

the good give in quarters, the ruthless go the distance,
the intrepid fingers of the honest word skim
the edge of menace and the surface of sedition

Olmec or Maya need not speculate that the weight
of complacent years are ready to split the plank:
parliaments hung, economies felled,

another species dropped from the ecosystem
the city’s suits crunch their numbers
and priests peddle flimsy hope

teachers run their conveyor belt curriculums,
bystanders continue to fumble with indifferent
rites of the past

another child, another injection of light
and they watch as the gleeful sound
of their play becomes fainter

iii

the labels that prevail are those they put on themselves
and how willingly, how readily, they fall into types;
the houses, the cars, the clothes –

surrogates for the estranged, collected tears
of inertia, pawns of simulated life,
occupiers of their gaping spaces

it is not time that robs them – they thieve time
and its probabilities, increasing experts
in excusing their own lethargy

I glimpsed the imaginative in an eye, one of them
momentarily forgot to dismiss; she felt the same
hope as when placed among trees

these seasons turn sharper than they used to,
sterner in command; for nature tries yet again
to transform them, to return them

Two Hands

I removed my talismans
long ago, ceased silence
greeted prayers:

pauper’s bargains made
with unseen, intangible
entities

shadows are casted
and luck is crafted

all that is done, is done
by the work of these
two hands

the blood of all that is
in my power to intervene,
to act on, is on them

of all that remains
unwritten, uninvented,
of which they were able

I am the author, the cause
of all that shines and dulls
within and around

we are all undiscovered
messiahs, waiting for our own
second coming

luck is casted
and shadows are crafted

all that is done, is done
by the work of these
two hands

©  Amanda Anastasi, 2011.

BIO:

Amanda Anastasi is a poet from Melbourne, Australia, whose work has been published in magazines and anthologies both locally and overseas, including in NZ, Ireland and the UK.  Amanda studied Professional Writing and Literature at Deakin University and is the 2010 and 2011 winner of the Seagull Poetry Prize.  She also won the 2011 C.J. Dennis Poetry Award as part of the Laura Literary Award in South Australia.  Amanda’s work has been featured on Federation Square’s scrolling text screens as part of the 2010 and 2011 Overload Poetry Festival in Melbourne, 3CR and Phoenix FM radio and on Channel 31’s Red Lobster program.  This year she will be a panelist at the Williamstown Literary Festival and will be releasing her first poetry collection 2012 and other poems.