The Disappearing: Fiona Wright

The Astronomer

Just stars, and grassland –
___to stand on the limit of the world
___and then climb upwards.

Here is his tower,
______his staircase curled and vagrant
as any dream:
It is pictured
next to the cow.

How constant the constellations,
this city now wheeling beneath them.
Here is his quiet heartbeat.

He must have heard the cries of children
in his sleep,
their lowing.

In his tower,
you breathe lungfuls
of sky.

_______________________________________________________
Fiona Wright is a Sydney poet, whose work has been published journals and anthologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. Her work was included in Best Australian Poems 2008, 2009, 2010 (Black Ink) and The Red Room Company’s Toilet Doors Project (2004). Fiona was runner-up in the 2008 John Marsden National Young Writers Award. In 2007, she was awarded an Island of Residencies placement at the Tasmania Writers’ Centre, developing a sequence of poems about Australians in Sri Lanka. Fiona’s poetry has featured in journals such as Going Down Swinging, Overland, Heat and the Australia Literary Review. Knuckled, her first collection of poems, (Giramondo Press) was published in 2011 and has been shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize.

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