New poetry by Linda Stevenson

Another Beat

How to escape the old rhythm,
because
it plays around, perpetual,
weaving classrooms out of nursery,
found bookends, bound songs,
the modelling of phrases,
inclusive
of current tongues, media,
the gymnasia
of dead classics.

Heritage of inland, shore, cliff,
bluestone and tent city; heritage
of Atlantic;
drownings and wailing starvation
up against the bardic, keening.

Read me bedtime,
rolling me over into soothed,
the merry beats recounting
in long cadence.

I listen to my own reading,
walk away from it glutted,
unsatisfied;
because
there was another way I wanted to speak,
not rolling off my tongue, not glib,
not generationally easy
with inheritance of poem...

but gaunt, under-stressed, built
on rough syllables
and guttural noise,
with bare rhyme,
a murderous tsunami,
not the plangent, bleating sea,
not civilized,
but
the gutted voice
of human.


- Linda Stevenson 2017

A founding member of Melbourne Poets Union, facilitator of poetry groups in gaols and community centres, contributor to anthologies. Chapbook “The Tipping Point” published in 2015, feature guest poet on Radio 3CR “Spoken Word”. Active as a poet within the online poetry sector, hosts regular Salons at her home in Frankston, Victoria.