Member's Spring 2025 Writing Competition

After:
I remember I’d wanted to sit out the back tonight
Expecting the night flowering cactus to mouth open
Its sweet white into the remaining burn-o: smoke
In the still-warm dark but sleep appeared to come
— Greg McLaren, Late Sonnets, 2026 Newcastle Poetry Prize

THE COLLECTOR
The heat shimmer cracked through this small town, a draggle of houses clustered along the narrow road running past shops, a pub and a shed that was both fire station and first aid depot.
          I made my first collection at sunrise. She was as pale as the sheets she lay on.
Next to the bed was a vintage hospital cabinet repurposed as a bedside table. It was
cluttered with medicines, jug of water and wilting flowers. I gathered her up, light as a
feather. She whispered as she saw me coming. “Took your time”.
          A trio of black cockatoos flew fast and silent across the smudge grey horizon. At the fire shed volunteers were throwing on yellow jackets and slamming shut the doors of their truck. They drove away, fast, in the direction the birds had come from.
Ashen snowflakes began falling.
They were also falling onto the surface of a small garden pond rippled by a solar fountain. Inside the house an old man dropped his coffee and clenched his jaw in pain. His wife was phoning for help as I faced him. “Not now. Too soon’’ he pleaded but it was too late for that. His wife was weeping as she pounded his chest.
          Embers began falling over the town and fire sprites danced among the houses in capricious choreography. Burning a house but not its neighbour. Scorching a shed
saved by the thin stream from a garden hose. A car burned and the engine melted into a flowing delta of silvery metal. A gas bottle exploded.
          Along a fire track I went to two of the firefighters, one of them breathing hard and swearing. Their backpacks were almost empty. I gathered them in when a fire blackened eucalyptus tree fell as they shouted at me “No! No! This can’t be happening”. Their exhaustion flowed away like water as I took them by the arm.
          Smoke hung thick in clouds over the town, and the sun made brief appearances
as a flaming red disc which gave no useful light. The air choked with the smell of a
thousand fires.
          In a once pretty garden a lady wandered, dragging a garden chair she’d salvaged. She sat, sad, thoughtful, gazing at a row of shattered ceramic pots and remains of boiled
and burnt cacti. She lay back as if in a sleep haze. “So tired”. I gathered her in.
          Smoke still dulled the waxing moon that rose as I left this town.