Tuesday Poem is Grass by Australian poet Jill Jones

 

Yes, Tuesday Poem is an international blog based in New Zealand, so Australians both post on it and are posted. This week the editor Catherine Bateson hails from Australia but is living in Paris on a writers' residency, and the poet Jill Jones is Australian too. She will be new to many New Zealand readers of the blog, but poets and poems leaping back and forth across the Tasman is one of the great things about the TP blog. Grass is an elegant poem that arrests the reader and starts like this: 

 

Empty girl I was, so far inside, grass didn't know me
It was something unbending, only light seemed to touch
But so long as I could smell the sea, so long as salt
I had extrications, music, that fire, phase & beat
And all around the world went off, banners & avenues, cruelties
Now it's come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown

 

 

... find the rest of the poem here: Grass by Jill Jones. Then try out some of the other Tuesday Poets and Poems in the sidebar. You'll find NZ Book Awards finalist Sarah Jane Barnett there for one.