Bring on 2021

Ripple Poetry

Volta Poetry: Kylie Thompson, June Perkins & Samuel Watson

VOLTA is co-presented monthly by Queensland Poetry Festival and Brisbane Square Library. It replaces Couplet Poetry, which has been well-loved for more than a decade, to bring you ⚡electric poetry, spoken word, and the unexpected.⚡

Fri Feb 5 2021 at 6:00 pm

Brisbane Square Library, 266 George Street, Brisbane, QLD, Australia 4000, Brisbane, Australia

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KYLIE THOMPSON is a poet and writer based in Redcliffe. Shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Prize in 2020, Kylie’s poetry will feature in an upcoming anthology from Neil Hilborn, due in 2021. Kylie can be found sharing poetry pieces on Instagram as @wildkatpoetry.

DR JUNE PERKINS is a multi-arts creative born to a Papua New Guinean Indigenous mother and Australian father. She was raised in Tasmania as a Bahá’i and combines poetry, blogging, photography and story to explore themes interesting her—peace, ecology, spirituality, diversity, resilience and…

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Meeting Readers!

Recent trip to the Gold Coast!

Magic Fish Dreaming

It was so joyful to meet readers of books I have put heart and soul into. Even though I did the best I could, it didn’t quite feel real launching Illuminations online.

It was a tough week in the lead up to the Gold Coast visit, as a reading event I was looking forward to was cancelled, and another trip to share the book was also proving impossible to organise.

But now having been out into the community to sell Illuminations (and other books), it feels real and my spirits are lifted.

People stopped throughout the day to chat and sometimes buy the books. It was wonderful readers are still attracted to Magic Fish Dreaming, and many copies were purchased by grandparents.

A massive thankyou to Big B books, for hosting me outside their shop.

Thank you to every single one of you who stopped, encouraged, purchased books, and shared…

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Working on Project X

Working on poetry!

Ripple Poetry

Arrival of a mentor text

My next poetry work doesn’t have a title. It;s a work in progress, drawing on my life, sense of being in the world and Australia as a woman of colour, a lover of actions beyond words, and just to make sense of this thing we call prejudice. It might include photographs, memoir, metaphor, lyricism, and is inspired by the many poets in the world, who in someway might lead me on my own journey, to understand why I write, where I am going and who I might become if I choose.

June Perkins

All the mentor texts gathered!

So you might ask yourself why do you write?

Do you like the idea of it?

Do you like the idea of an author?

Or do you write to understand

to release

the tough memories

so they dance until they make sense

so the transcend you and…

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Burnish of the Spirit

(c) June Perkins, image.

“Be swift in the path of holiness, and enter the heaven of communion with Me. Cleanse thy heart with the burnish of the spirit, and hasten to the court of the Most High.”
–Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Persian

What does it look like – this path of holiness?

What does it feel like – this burnish of the spirit?

What does it sound like – the court of the Most High?

I hear its melody in the flute and its back beat in the soul drum.

It brings me to account each day.

It sings prayer is more than words.

Action is more than for the self.

Be, not just say.

Burnish of the spirit

polish provided by tests.

So swift it passes,

so fleeting

the song will end.

And then it gleams – this life of holiness.

(c) June Perkins 26/10/2020

For more see Nineteen Months.