Paul Stevens



Paul Stevens was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and has lived in Australia for most of his life. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney, with an Honours degree in Early English Literature and Language, where he did much of his work on the poetry of John Skelton. He also majored in History and Archaeology, which remain core interests for him. He teaches Literature and History at an academically selective high school in New South Wales, Australia. He founded and edits two online literary magazines, the Shit Creek Review and The Chimaera, as well as serving as a selection panelist for the sonnet magazine 14by14, edited by Australian poet and writer Peter Bloxsom. His own poems have been widely published. Writers whose work he particularly admires include Sappho, John Skelton, Shakespeare, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Robert Graves, Laura Riding and John Crowe Ransom; more recently Les Murray, John Whitworth, Stephen Edgar and Rose Kelleher. He firmly believes in the importance of a living Muse to the process of poetic thought. He lives on the New South Wales coast with his wife and numerous children, dogs, trees and raucous birds.



The Relics

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed two skeletons thought to be
5,000 to 6,000 years old, locked in an embrace. Their sex has not yet
been determined. (BBC)

Mother to daughter, softly touching, is it?
Sister to sister's delicate embrace?
Friend to friend, companions past corruption?
Brother to brother, face to well-loved face?

The wheat crop rippled in the heat, the cattle
Grazed sweet grass, milk splashed in bowls of clay;
All fell to dust; from dust these rise, recovered
As brush and trowel lift slow time away.

Lover to lover, holding all that's dear,
They gaze into each other's eyes, long blind,
Stripped back to bony gesture: stubborn relics,
So much of earth, so much of human kind.

Originally published in Poemeleon



The Big Red Chair

Questions of who and how, of why and where,
Of what's appropriate, of what causes pain,
Of when we might or might not meet again,
Of years, of duty, of propriety, of …

All fade to a gentle sighing of breathed air
As you and I slouch in the big red chair
Together, side by side, heads lolled back there,
Hands almost touching, and we shyly stare
Into each other's eyes — charged with love.



Beit Hanoun Aftermath, Viewed on YouTube

Despite the buffering, it jerks and freezes,
then starts again: the ululations roughly
severed mid-cry, jump-cutting at random
to howls of impotence, siren symphonies.
A medic’s gloved hand tries to wipe death from
an infant’s head, as if death were mere spillage
that could be cleansed by earnest application.
Oxygen clamped against a face—the spirit

pumped into matter which declines to matter.
Mis-spelled captions criticise the slaughter,
ignoring Israel’s right to self defense.
Massacre? Too emotive. Technical error.
Regrettable. A hundred pays for one.
Despite the suffering, it starts again.

Originally published in Contemporary Sonnet



Rock-a-bye

A time was once, rocked in a matrixed cradle,
slung in a skew-tree, variously branched
through clouds of crow, to skies of fiery opal,
and down its roots gripped, deeper, till they reached

bone, where they grew mouths to sip the gravel's
juice, and therewith wove our grass and vetch.
Then young Clodhopper hopped his merry ramble —
big tooth, all goof, guffaw! His hands might catch

the butterfly of thought-threads through the tangle
of earth and air's laced rivalry, cross-hatched.
But you and I must nuzzle close, and huddle
from time, which sucks our brains (O hungry leech!),

that time which cries a “Happy ever after!”
until all is — and us, forever, fable.

Originally published in 14by14



Huh?

I wrote a letter to my love,
My darling one, my own;
I said to her, "Tongue-click, scat-sing,
Scream, whistle, woof, grunt, moan!"

I hoped that she would see my point,
Would know she was my dear,
And so I added to my note:
"Rah, hum, applause, wail, cheer!"

"My ugh! My psst! My dandy huh!
My la la la la la!
Oh you must realise, my whoop!
How dadada you are!"

It worked! And now we tickle, buzz,
Squelch, whack, and zipple bong,
Slurp, smackoo, burble, ahhhh and ooooh
And mmmm the whole night long!

Originally published in Snakeskin



The Improper Muse

My Muse is inappropriate, improper, bad to know,
The kind of girl with whom I ought not play.
I shouldn’t even write to her: the rule books all say so;
Such peccadilloes cause public dismay.

And where does all this scandal leave a poet, vis à vis
His verse, if just to write to her’s a crime?
And when she says, 'Fool! Look in thine own heart!’, what shall I see
There, but her? — My dangerous Muse! — A bust, arranged in rhyme!

Originally published in Snakeskin



A Birth

From littered fragments—woven—
Such oddments of the dead—
A reconstructed life—of me—
Gestated in his head.

He analysed my hair,
My fingernails—for dust.
Their tale—a second birth for me,
More gentle than the first.

A child—of his laboratory—
Freed from the womb of earth,
I gathered up my errant soul—
And stepped—gravely—forth.

Originally published in Shattercolors



Dante Met Beatrice

...ne l'ultimo di questi die avvenne che questa
mirabile donna apparve a me...
— Dante, La Vita Nuova, III

Dante met Beatrice, just briefly, and just twice,
   Yet loved her, utterly, his whole life through:
He'd never seen her clap her hands at some idea, and laugh,
   Her eyes alight, and dance for perfect joy—as I have you.

Originally published in The London Poetry Review



The Muse of Fire

Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
— Catullus, V

As my mind drifts into the surf of sleep
  Each night, it is your numinous face I see —
Ethereal, those blue eyes focused deep —
  Framed by the jaggèd luff of flame rushed free

From both ends of the fire-poi you're twirling.
  You dance entranced, pushing the flame-streak, spinning
Fire to scribe a hot, sharp circle: a whirling
  Blade which cuts the fabric of this burning

Instant into a cameo of light
  Carved clean away, out from the matrix air,
Out from the relentless black of night,
  To rise suspended in a glory, where

Perfect, detached and radiant, you hover
In one pure moment, lifted away from Never.

Originally published in Soundzine



The Green Inn, 5:00 pm

(after Rimbaud’s ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’)

For eight days straight I battered my boots about
On the stony roads. I strolled into Charleroi,
—Into the Green Inn: ordered slices of bread
And butter, with half-cooled ham. Happy, I sprawled

My legs right out, under the green table:
I contemplated the rather naive designs
On the wallpaper—and it was sweet as, when
The girl with enormous titties and lively eyes,

—There's no kiss known could give that one a fright!—
Smiling, served me rounds of buttered bread
And lukewarm ham piled on a coloured plate—

Rosy and white ham, fragrant with garlic—and filled
My huge mug up with beer, whose foamy head
Was shot to gold by a ray of late sunshine.

Originally published in Snakeskin



Beached

He has, by intuition, luck, or timing,
Dodged grape-shot, chain-shot, boarding-axe and cutlass;
Out-gambled pox, Kill-Devil, gallows, women;
Out-lived Teach, Calico, and Kidd. Too fucking

Clapped-out now: too old to bugger prisoners
Pleading in some sperm-splashed bloody shambles;
Even the guileless jape of slicing throats
Has lost its juicy joys. A bony fossil,

Beached upon a bench outside the Benbow,
He sips a gentle posset — no rumbustion
To sear the mouth that once hissed, "Slit their tripes!"
His watery eye winks at the baker's girl;

His claw pats children's curls. The townsfolk cruise,
Fat galleons, past where he sits becalmed—
A gaunt oddness, gossiping with gulls,
Minding his Ps and Qs and, most, his arse.

He spreads out, in his mind, an antique chart,
Its corners calligraphically embellished
With loops and curves fantastically unscrolling,
With seas of spouting whales, and dolphins rolling,

And puff-cheeked tritons blowing small flotillas
Away, across the wave-flecked map of places
Past compass rose, to where a wide lacuna
Is curling back the edges of the parchment.

Deftly wielding his fingers as dividers,
He plots the new course in the air before him,
Close calculating every tack and run
To his next landfall: Terra Incognita.

Originally published in WORM