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Patricia Sykes
Also by Patricia Sykes Wire Dancing
Patricia Sykes is a prize-winning poet and the author of the acclaimed collection, Wire Dancing (1999). In 1996 “river salvages” won the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award and “death, passionfruit and roses” was a finalist in the 1995 AUNTECH Poetry Prize. Two of the poems in Modewarre have been awarded prizes. “Modewarre - ways you might approach it” was Highly Commended in the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize and “Sanctuary: Swan lake, Phillip Island” won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize.
Lake Modewarre cryptids
carnal water and the longing for immersion
all day the bunyips' wash and catastrophe
disturbances in the crust, the core, lap lap
at the shore, a swamp harrier hovers,
around the rim the volcano relics
old misshapens, old toxics, the wind
not now a thing of sulphur, instead this
creature named most grotesque of the
feathered, an isolate, impossible to reach
in a day's baffled swim, inside her black
mirrory eye the calm lake floating
which is not food nor refuge nor God
she can smell you fresh from the pages
too many hours of massacre research
too many footprints leading too far in
the wind pulls tears from the sockets
as if you came for a cleansing, be hard
hard she says not soft's eternal sinking
