June 24, 2026 — 21:15

Author: Dorothy Johnston  Category: Uncategorized  Comments: 0

I’ve recently had two poems included in Catchment 6 poetry of place, a publication of the Baw Baw Arts Alliance. BBAA is a community arts organisation based in West Gippsland, Victoria. Thanks to them for publishing my poems.

Easter at Waralilly

I write this in anticipation of the guns,

the echoing of gunfire off the houses.

The reeds around the swamp 

do not so much give back an echo

as bear witness to untimely death.

Not the death and re-birth of the god,

the coming of spring on the other side of earth.

Here it is autumn and the days are closing in. 

Humans pray in churches 

and give thanks that they are saved.   

Out here, who bears witness save the reeds and bushes

and the few who stand, not in a church,

but beside the water where the ducks are shot?

They watch and count and film,

hoping that their presence might one day save a life.

Easter rituals ignore what goes mostly unrecorded.

But I mark each death here in my poem,

and record how men with guns shoot birds for entertainment,

while a god dies for their sins and is born again.    

Mermaids’ Hair

To call a seaweed mermaids’ hair 

is to invite a magical connection,

here between the tides

where a forest of kelp has washed up overnight.

Mermaids’ hair among the kelp 

shines green and glossy

against thick brown limbs.

It has another common name – 

gutweed – prosaic and mysterious.

I know that it’s eaten in some parts of the world.

Nutritious and sustaining, rich in vitamins and protein.

I know that it can be invasive,

clogging up the surface

so that turtles find it hard to breathe.

I know that it can catch the unwary in its flowing tresses.

But I prefer to find truth in Walt Whitman,

who called grass ‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves’,

who would have known what he was looking at

were he to walk on this beach now.

Perhaps the mermaid never means to trap

anyone or anything, perhaps she is simply

laying out her hair to dry before the tide comes in.