Category Archives: nonce forms

Simon MacCulloch, ‘The Sign of the Cross’

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There’s a cross in the field where the scarecrow stood
And the ravens have all come back
And the ravens would say, if they only could
That a scarecrow is straw and a cross is wood
And the wings of a famine black.

There’s a cross on the grave where the hero lies
He whose war was to end all wars
And his empty skull holds a thousand why’s
And the crow that struts on his grave replies
With a thousand triumphant caws.

There’s a cross on the hill where the scapegoat hung
Like a scarecrow to ward off sin
And the prayers are said and the hymns are sung
And the gorcrows perch on their hills of dung
Where the plagues of the world begin.

There’s a cross in the dark of the Southern sky
Where the stars wink a long farewell
As the ghosts of the ravens prepare to fly
To return to the void of their black god’s eye
With a tale that they’ll never tell.

*****

Simon MacCulloch writes: “This poem melds the Christian symbol of death and resurrection with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in an attempt to express how one feels after reading the world news in recent times.”

‘The Sign of the Cross’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of journals including Reach Poetry, View from Atlantis, Spectral Realms, Altered Reality, Aphelion and others.

Illustration: “tomorrow….” by begemot_dn is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Maryann Corbett, ‘To the Anti-Librarian’

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Small vandal, parked on your padded bum
on a cheerful rug in the Children’s Section
next to a bottom shelf,
yanking the volumes one by one
till they strew the aisle in every direction,
loudly pleased with yourself
at the way your brightly patterned havoc
obstructs the traffic,

keep to your task. Disrupting order
is evolution’s eternal purpose.
Surely it’s been your goal
from the hour two gametes burst their border
and two tame selves went wild as a circus.
Systems that once felt whole
eyeballed each other, laughed, and gambled,
and lives got scrambled.

Do your worst, then, with giggles, rage,
and all the smackdown-loud rebellion
grown-ups are now too tired for.
These sleepless two, in a golden age,
were a black-clad goth and a hard-rock hellion.
Change is the charge we’re wired for.
small changer, blessings. Though elders frown,
pull the world down.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Like many poems, this one (first published in LIGHT) is part memory and part pure fiction. “Anti-librarian” was our joke term for our daughter as an infant when (long years ago) she sat on her tush next to the bookshelves and pulled the books off just because she could. The image of young parents as reformed characters is imaginary. The hope that the young will change the world seems to be eternal.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Picture: ‘Anti-Librarian’ by RHL and ChatGPT.

Weekend read: Stephen Edgar, ‘Murray Dreaming’

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It’s not the sharks
Sliding mere inches from his upturned face
Through warps of water where the tunnel arcs
Transparent overhead,
Their lipless jaws clamped shut, extruding teeth,
Their eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead,
Staring at him; it’s not the eerie grace
Of rays he stood beneath,
Gaping at their entranced slow-motion chase

That is unending;
It’s not the ultra-auditory hum
Of ET cuttlefish superintending
The iridescent craft
Of their lit selves, as messages were sent,
Turning the sight of him they photographed
To code: it is not this that left him dumb
With schoolboy wonderment
Those hours he wandered the aquarium.

It is that room,
That room of Murray River they had walled
In glass and, deep within the shifting gloom
And subtle drifts of sky
That filtered down, it seemed, from the real day
Of trees and bird light many fathoms high,
The giant Murray cod that was installed
In stillness to delay
All that would pass. The boy stood there enthralled.

Out in the day
Again, he saw the famous streets expound
Their theories about speed, the cars obey,
Racing to catch the sun,
The loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd
That in the multitudes not everyone
Should understand as he did the profound
Profession of the cod,
That held time, motionless, unknown to sound.

In bed at night,
Are his eyes open or is this a dream?
The room is all dark water, ghosted light,
And midway to the ceiling
The great fish with its working fins and gills
Suspended, while before it glide the reeling
And see-through scenes of day, faintly agleam,
Until their passage stills
And merges with the deep unmoving stream.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “As the reader may guess, although the poem is cast in the third person, in the figure of a young boy, it describes a visit to an aquarium that I made myself, and as an adult. And on the occasion of this visit I was struck, and deeply impressed, by the single large Murray cod, seemingly floating motionless in its large room-sized tank of water, designed to mimic a section of the Murray River. Impressed in what way? Well, it is hard to say, but there seemed to be a certain mystery and power embodied in this fish, which was sealed off from me, inaccessible. The image stayed with me. However, it was only when I revisited the aquarium some years later that this original mood was reawakened and prompted me to write a poem about it. 

“The challenge was to find the right way to express it.  I didn’t want the poem to seem too portentous and self-important, so I thought that by seeing it through the eyes of a young boy I could give it a certain lightness of touch. But also the young are often considered to be more in touch with the natural world than adults, with their worldly preoccupations. In the midst of all the other superficially more attractive and appealing creatures in the aquarium, this particular boy is transfixed by this large fish. He has, I suppose you could say, a vision. What of? Well, some kind of vision of timelessness and continuity represented in nature, in comparison with which the speed and hubbub of daily life—represented by the city traffic and crowds—seem trivial and unimportant.

“In a way, the poem is already over by the end of the fourth stanza. The main point has been made. But a poem has an aesthetic shape as well as a meaning and I felt the need to round it off in some emotionally satisfying way. So I placed the boy, after the day was over and he was home again, lying in bed reliving his vision. Maybe he is dreaming; maybe he is awake and having a waking dream: either way he sees the fish in the midst of his ordinary everyday room, and overlaid on this he sees the city scenes, which are gradually absorbed by the dream river and dream fish. 

“The word “dreaming” in the poem’s title, while it can refer to this last stanza, is also meant to imply the use of the word in indigenous Australian culture, signifying a body of lore connected to a totemic animal or sacred place.

“The poem is written in a nonce stanza form of my own devising, with nine lines rhyming ABACDCBDB, in pentameter, apart from line one in dimeter, and lines four and eight in trimeter.

“The poem first appeared in Poetry (Chicago). It then appeared in The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (Fort Worth, Baskerville Publishers, 2012), now out of print; then in my ninth book, Eldershaw; and also in The Strangest Place.”

*****

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Murray Cod at Melbourne Aquarium” by brittgow is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

RHL, ‘Privelitch’

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Some suffer from a travel itch
but I call that a snivel glitch
I only want to travel rich
and love it: it’s my privelitch.
O privelitch, o privelitch!

I only go to schools most rich,
(and only eat foods superrich),
then college has to be Oxbritch,
for that’s my privelitch.
I love you, love you, bitch!

I wear the robes and coronitch,
I swear by God I’ve found my nitch,
for, be I tubby, tall or titch,
I’ve got my privelitch.
O privelitch, o privelitch,
I love you, love you, bitch!

I never on my class would snitch
(or if I do, it’s just a smitch);
I’m faithful – cept for those I ditch,
for that’s my privelitch.
O privelitch, o privelitch!

I down it nail, I up it stitch,
call me a wizard or a witch,
I’ve got it all, with perfect pitch,
for that’s my privelitch.
I love you, love you, bitch!

My life with none I’d ever switch,
I’m over all, no slightest twitch,
and even when I’m in Death’s ditch
my tomb shouts Privelitch!
O privelitch, o privelitch,
I love you, love you, bitch!

*****

Don’t think I’m unaware of my own privilege: white males with above-average education are a privileged minority in any country. But also you reading this, whoever you are, you are privileged to not be a child in Gaza or any of the other hells that humans make for each other on an otherwise beautiful planet; you are privileged to be alive during this affluent and pivotal time in human history. And of course those who in addition have cultivated a taste for poetry… is there maybe a hint of privilege there?

This poem, like Buccaneer, was recently published in Magma.

Photo: “General Election Bullingdon Club Members in 1987, including Boris Johnson and David Cameron” by Diego Sideburns is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Rachel Hadas, ‘Rag Rug’

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It has arrived—the long rag rug
multiply folded. On top, one alien hair.
I put my face to the folds and smell despair
palpable as salt air
in all those rooms and houses, small and smug—
enclosures I passed through on my way where?

Whoever did the weaving appears old
in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face,
can only conjure up the faintest trace
of an abstracted grace,
clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold
these precious things, in some unheard-of place?

I perch her on a hill, precariously
beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom.
Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room
(no bigger than the loom)
is proof against the violence of the sky
From it I further spin what I once called my home:

Endless horizons fading into haze,
the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear;
snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere,
the brightness of the air,
terraces, valleys organizing space
and time’s cessation. So this package here

I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today
(rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace
my strands of language barely can express;
dishrags of dailiness
dispersed and recombined and freshly gay)
comes to me imbued with images,

slowly and faithfully across the water,
across the world. It represents a time
I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme
as soon as I went home,
if that is where I am. These rugs recover
the sense of stepping twice into a single river.

*****

Rachel Hadas writes: “Rag Rug, written probably around 1980 or sometime in the early Eighties, describes my experience opening packages of rag rugs handwoven by a woman or women in Samos, the Greek island where I’d lived between 1971 and 1974. The rags in question were blue jeans, pajamas, tablecloths, you name it – I’d cut these into narrow strips which I sewed together and rolled into a ball, and when I had enough such balls I mailed them to my former mother-in-law in Samos; she eventually sent me the finished project, long rag rugs perhaps eighteen inches wide, colorful, washable, which eventually faded and blended as madras does. The evocative smell of the cloth; the memories of the island and my life there; the fact that poetry, like the making  of these rugs, like quilting, is a piecing together, recombining and recycling of fragments – reading the poem now brings all this back.”

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “Colourful rag rug” by theihno is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Nonce form: RHL, ‘Buccaneer’

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These are the waters of the buccaneer–
they live large lives and lounge around with liquor,
floating on waters calm, gin-clear,
their risks outrageous and their thinking thin,
alert to bargain and to dicker
and not averse to sin–
a life erratic.

The time of storms starts… ends… another year
has gone by, always it seems quicker–
thoughts of a distant home fade, disappear–
beard covers sunken cheeks and chin
and there’s no comment, jibe or snicker,
only a rueful grin,
wry, enigmatic.

There’s no reflection or confession here,
for there’s no use for church or vicar.
Security is in the bandolier;
here, courts and coppers don’t look in,
the flame of justice can no more than flicker.
More feared is the shark’s fin:
steady, emphatic.

But years creep up–ears deafen and eyes blear–
dry stone gets harder and wet walkways slicker,
and friends go out upon a bier.
It’s hardly worthwhile trying to begin
new quests once you’ve absorbed this kicker:
‘Really, what’s there to win?’
Change becomes static.

O pirate with your dwindling sense of cheer,
while lounging on rattan and wicker!
Though others lack your lazy lack of fear,
their fine awards, like yours, are only tin.
Enjoy your days and friends; don’t bicker:
soak in life’s warmth and din.
Be undramatic.

*****

I wrote this poem two years ago, and thought it was strong enough to get me into a good new magazine for the first time. And so it turned out… after 20 rejections, the 21st accepted it. So now I’m proud to be featured on the promo page for the latest Magma.

And about time too – after being brought up in a house called ‘Buccaneer Hill‘, by parents who started the ‘Buccaneer Club‘ guest house and restaurant, this poem was long overdue.

Illustration: RHL + ChatGPT

Nonce form: Stephen Edgar, ‘In Search of Time to Come’

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There’s not much noise above the sputtering fire.
They don’t speak much.
The children are settling to a private croon,
Though the baby whimpers, palping blindly to clutch
At a breast. Farther back, picked out by a
Final index finger of the sun, someone squats.
They’ll be changing their abode quite soon,
No doubt.
The time requires a tacit finishing touch,
From women working at rough pots
And men scraping a hide to peg it out.

This mood, this life, is like a circle, turning
Always back
On itself: expectation interlocking
Ritual; impulse to novelty, for lack
Of its not yet invented learning,
Subsiding again to things that they take pleasure from.
A hum. A mother’s body rocking,
They are, you would say, at home.

Only the cave mouth, that changeable screen,
Opens a gap
In the circumference; and when the light
Is gone, they have no words by which to trap,
Or the notions by which words could mean,
What that black window’s showing for them to detect,
As they look, perplexed, into the night
And stare,
Then turn towards each other’s bodies to tap
Their comfort. Someone, they suspect,
Is out there; and they’re right. We are out there.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “I can no longer remember the specific circumstances which gave rise to this poem, but it was possibly some television documentary about ancient hominins. As Philip Larkin said in a rather different context, “Truly, though our element is time,/ We are not suited to the long perspectives/ Open at each instant of our lives.” The vertiginous gulf of time between ourselves and our earliest ancestors is a subject that has always fascinated me, and I have written other poems dealing with it; indeed, my next book opens with a poem on a similar theme. The difference with In Search of Time to Come is the notion of these ancient humans attempting to peer forward into the deep future, rather than modern humans gazing back into the deep past.

“The poem is metrical with full rhyme. The stanza form, for stanzas one and three, is one of my own devising, with varying line lengths and complex rhyme scheme. Stanza two varies the pattern, breaking off after eight lines, with a slight adjustment to the rhyme scheme. Why? I can’t remember; it was a spontaneous idea that occurred to me in the writing.

As far as I can remember, this poem had no magazine publication and first appeared in my second book Ancient Music (Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1988), which is out of print. It has been republished in The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2020), which is available on the Black Pepper website.”

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Leave the door open!” by In Memoriam: VernsPics is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Lucius Falkland, ‘The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre’

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My life had become like a broadsheet,
The Telegraph, maybe The Times:
The financial section—prose sober and neat;
Inflation—the yen falls and climbs.
While reading this daily, and ever more jaded,
By boring discussions of wages,
My newspaper tore, the ink quickly faded:
You ripped your way up through the pages.

The suits on the concourse at Waterloo Station
All noticed my joy and my fright.
My Times underwent a divine transformation
Like someone regaining his sight.
You stood by the clock where they waited for trains,
Familiar, reserved, but with flair.
My journal of record? It went up in flames:
In a flash, I was reading Jane Eyre.

My feelings, so dulled by SSRIs
And age with the wealth of a hovel,
Without any warning felt very alive;
I was suddenly part of a novel.
My wife was now Bertha, enraged in the attic,
Your boyfriend was St. John, I guess.
Attraction was instant, inspiring, emphatic:
This burgundy-nailed governess.

The prose promptly altered: transcendent, noetic,
No longer the stark black and white;
Facts, figures, but beauty so very poetic:
A sunset one Thornfield Hall night.
I’m not quite as brooding as him, that I’m sure,
And you’re not as serious or neat.
The Times had become such a hideous bore,
All it took was for us two to meet.

Within half an hour we both felt so certain
But English restraint and control
Meant it took time to say we were clearly one person,
Each making the other one whole.
I’ve accepted my life’s not The Times but Jane Eyre
And in Brontë my future I’ll find.
Let’s hope if this moves beyond an affair
I don’t get myself burnt and go blind.

*****

Lucius Falkland writes: “This poem (first published in The Society of Classical Poets) recalls how my sometime paramour and I first met and very quickly felt that we had encountered ourselves in each other. Due to the large age gap, her friend referred to me as Mr Rochester, from Jane Eyre. This is how we started referring to each other. Her boyfriend also became known as St John thereafter. It also tries to capture the feeling, when you are deeply in love, that life seems fateful and inherently profound, as though you are just a character in a novel written by someone else. The jocular tone attempts to encapsulate the joy and absurdity of the experience.”

Lucius Falkland is the nom de plume of a writer and academic originally from London. His first poetry volume, The Evening The Times Newspaper Turned Into Jane Eyre, was published in 2025 with Exeter House Publishing. It can be purchased here.

Stephen Edgar, ‘Dawn Solo’

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First light beside the Murray in Mildura,
Which like a drift of mist pervades
The eucalypt arcades,
A pale caesura

Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes
To usher in the dawn are heard
From a pied butcherbird,
A phrase that floats

So slowly through the silence-thickened air,
Those notes, like globules labouring
Through honey, almost cling
And linger there.

Or is it that the notes themselves prolong
The time time takes, to make it stand,
Morning both summoned and
Called back by song.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “This poem needs little comment, I think. The bird in question is the pied butcherbird, as the poem says, considered by some to have the most beautiful song of any Australian bird. Let me quote some field guides to Australian birds: “superb, slow, flute-like mellow notes”; “song is one of our finest: a varied sequence of pure fluty whistles, sometimes interspersed by throaty warbles”; “fluted, far-carrying notes that seem to reflect the loneliness of its outback haunts”. Perhaps that third quotation best suggests the quality I was trying to capture. The notes seemed to be in slow motion, slowing time. I was attending the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Mildura is on the southern bank of the Murray River in northwestern Victoria. This was the first occasion on which I had heard the pied butcherbird.

“The form is a quatrain rhyming ABBA, with lines progressively shortening from pentameter, though tetrameter, trimeter to dimeter. It was first published in Australian Book Review and then in my twelfth book The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2020), which is available on the Black Pepper website.”

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)” by aviceda is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: RHL, ‘(on the value of learning languages when) Roughing It In Europe’

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One two three four
Is OK, but you need more:

Un deux trois quat’
If you want a welcome mat

En to tre fire
With the krone getting dearer,

Bir iki uç dirt
Selling off your jeans or shirt

Wahid zoozh teleta arba
In a cafe by the harbour

Üks kaks kolm neli
For some food to fill your belly;

Jeden dwa trzy cztery
Language may be shaky, very,

Uno dos tres cuatro
But they’ll love you if you’re up to

Eins zwei drei vier
Trying freely, laughing freer.

*****

This is one of my youthful hitchhiking days poems… It has just been republished in Firewords Campfire, but was originally in Unsplendid (and then in Better Than Starbucks, and Orchards Poetry Journal).

Firewords paired it with a short story, and commented they were “very different adventures, both centred on the art of connection: one through clumsy but charming attempts to bridge language gaps abroad, the other via a game that becomes a quiet battleground for attention, memory, and something close to intimacy. In both, every word counts.” It is always interesting to hear other people’s takes.

Artwork by Jay Carter, an illustrator from Lancashire who enjoys creating bold, colourful images, often finding inspiration in books, films, history, nature and travel. jaycarterillustrator.com