Best Housemaids Poems

Le Rat Noir – Translation of Iris Clayton’s « The Black Rat » by T. Wignesan

(Iris Clayton of the Wiradjuri tribe in New South Wales was born in 1945. One of nine children, six of the elder children were forcibly removed by the authorities and...

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He owned no fabled treasures
Nor the kingdom of a king, 
No horses or elephants
Nor a catapult or a sling.

He said he owned the blue skies
Birds, animals & the trees, 
Heavens had legated them
With its rivers & the seas.

Not a thread on his bare back
Belongings a...

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Cubbie worker…

So you worked on an out station on Cubbie…
Saw the cattle tracks and also the sheep …
You were only a poor boundary rider …
On your straw bed the hut you did sleep…

The Manager ate in the dining room ….
Jackaroo's, silk shirts and ties were...

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It’s 5pm and sunny in Ohio, 40 degrees
and dropping,
by dusk it will be grey turning to red
then black.

Where is the oyster shell now?
The heavenly picture
of a pale spume-tickled .
An unmarried Tudor lady
applies more cosmetic beeswax
to a Monarch butterfly.

I will see the road from my front...

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