Empire
Five winters
stone has kept my fingers
agile
Reaching into coat’s
warm pocket
hand navigates ancient Plovdiv
in a piece
of gravel—weather’s shrapnel—
as my old
coat’s wool weaves heat
into my skin
All this
stone’s patient indifference
observes in
press
of passing seasons
All this discarded time
reflected
in petroglyph’s striation
as now
the oil of human
hands laid on
as now their second
hand
fever warms
a fragment of lost Thrace
lost empire
Kate Middleton is a Melbourne writer. She has completed a music degree at the University of Melbourne, majoring in composition and is currently completing Honours in Literature. Her poems have been published in many Australian newspapers and journals including The Age,The Australian, Heat and Meanjin, and have been set to music by many Melbourne composers. She has written the libretti for three operas, including Lapse by Alan Lee, which was performed in 2002 at Melba Hall and The Museum of Victoria. In 2005 a selection of her poems was set by Natalie Williams for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; in the following year she won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize for ‘Rainbow’s End’ which is published in , her first book of poetry (Giramondo Publishing, 2009). She is currently undertaking flying trapeze training.
