Judith Bishop was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1972. Her poems have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in Poetry (2002-2004), an Academy of American Poets University Prize (2004), and the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (2006), and they appear in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (ed. Judith Beveridge) and The Best Australian Poems 2006 (ed. Dorothy Porter). She works as a Linguist/Project Manager with a speech technology company in Sydney.
As a crow shakes the weight of flesh
clinging to its beak
as if it dreads the snap mutation
of desire into burden
I tore them from my shoulders.
Such heavy bones and wired skin
I didn’t reckon on!
Nor this image of my father’s strict
duty to my life —
how he bares his love to grip me,
that he dares to reinvent me.
To shape a flying thing of what should never;
to make a heart balance on the wind.
(Zoomorphic stone figure of an echidna foetus,
Mae Enga Valley, Papua New Guinea, c. 1500 B.C.)
You knew I was a listener.
Hunched around my song, rocking to it, baby I.
Leaf-smoked and litter-laid.
Stroked my ear-nodes, eyes, snout,
saw potential in the flesh.
Small wonder of not-yet.
A bloodied little monster,
cut dying from the kill.
My song unfurled from my conception.
Your blood song is unknown to me, but you
revolve about me as I listen,
tribe of eyes.
That morning there was frost,
grass a clutter of white shards.
We took a rock your size, and carved,
a leaf fell on the head —
I began to hear your rasp —
and then, you entered wholly in the stone.
And so, we threw your body to the dogs.
• • •
A vine tendril,
climbing air
with the angle and inflection
of desireless desire, is
just such a keen antenna
for the singing of the world
as I am, stone ears
turned toward the world’s
nativities:
The unborn’s hearing
is nearest to the source; we need
the world’s singing and the world
is heard through us.
© 2007
Salt Publishing Limited 
