Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

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Olvar Wood Writers Retreat

 
 

Orchid Anima

John Ryan
 

sometimes it works well
to hammer your dulcet note
xxxxxxxxinto the throat of the wind;
it has been a good year,
rain-wise, for the donkey orchids
xxxxxxxxof the Eneabba sand plains.

sanguine-yellow tremors in air,
stammerings of petal-syllables,
xxxxxxxxcheeks animated by the vivid flush
of pigments bladdered in downpour,
un-delicate elementals, entirely
xxxxxxxxguarded by scorpion plectra.

love-children at the sun’s last flaring—
at certain angles, they are coy
xxxxxxxxfaces squinching noon-burnt noses,
curved upon by casuarina locks;
then their tongues madden with desire,
xxxxxxxxand limp waspy legs dangle forth.

etheric flowerers who are not yet mass,
who are too light for air, four dimensions
xxxxxxxxof blossom conjured from sand,
residues of sky slumbering in earth:
orchid anima, punctuating the heathland
xxxxxxxxat the cusp of darkness.

Platanthera bifolia. by Franz Koehler, c

About the Author

John Ryan is a postgraduate researcher at Edith Cowan University, an amateur botanist and an avid long-distance walker. The poem 'Orchid Anima' is part of a larger research project that invokes the writer-as-botanist tradition of John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Pablo Neruda to create poetic interpretations of the unusual endemic flora of Southwest Australia. He’s especially interested in the relationship between wild plants and humans. He has had plant poems and philosophical pieces published in various online journals, including SWAMP, Landscapes, Australian Humanities Review, and Philament. 


 

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