Community Tree Planting

Let's take our souls 
       for a morning in the bush

And gathering our planters
          in open spaces
          ask them to 'dig'

Let's bring water, trowels, family and friends
      as signs of care

And when we're done 
     listen to
          the saplings sing

By June Perkins

A planting day with Men of the Trees Queensland and Habitat Brisbane.

Many thanks to the Scouts who put on a BBQ afterwards and to all the planters.

Remembering Mr Richard St Barbe Barker.

If you are a teacher or student, you might also want to check out

the Red Room’s Poem Forest.

Published in Southerly

Delighted to be included in Southerly.

June Perkins, Two Livestreamed Funerals, a Cancelled Wedding, and the Saving Grace of Poetry

Extract from Southerly Announcement

“The diverse work offered here, in Southerly’s first online-only issue, gathers “Australian” writing produced in many different places and circumstances. Heterogenous and singular in its contents, the layered contiguity of digital publication optimistically promotes the lateral and multitemporal formation of the commons, true to the big ambitions and longevity of this venerable “little magazine.”

Our contributors dwell in and on the permeability of extreme and ordinary states, temporal confusion and disturbance, bringing genre to bear on forms of technological, linguistic, and psychical mediation, exposing Berlantian “impasse” in myriad ways.

We are grateful to Create NSW for a grant to pay contributors at a particularly disastrous time for arts funding. Most of all, we are grateful to the brilliant contributors who have entrusted us with their work. We loved putting this issue together. We hope our readers love it too.

*Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

Southerly 79.3: The Way We Live Now

This special edition is entirely open access and free. You may read it online, download and, if you wish, print and share it. Read and enjoy!

Edited by Kate Lilley and Melissa Hardie.