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The last few months have certainly been challenging. Fires, floods and now plague. Already we have seen the offers of support and funding made to those impacted by the Morrison fires of 2019/2020 forgotten and people and the environment abandoned as we are overtaken by the next crisis. In such an environment it is important to remember and to make our leaders remember the commitments they made. This is one of the reasons I am proud to have two poems in the anthology From the Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort edited by C.S. Hughes and published by Maximum Felix Media.
My two poems in the anthology, ‘self evacuation’ and ‘charcoal drawing’, are raw poems, written with the memory of a summer of fire, smoke and danger in the Blue Mountains. My thanks to the editor, C.S. Hughes for including them in the collection.
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As Hughes says in the introduction to the anthology:
It has been a season of fire and flood. It is not that we are unfamiliar, in our dry and storm driven land, with such seasons, but these elements, perhaps through our ignorance and neglect, have burgeoned and magnified, returned on a scale that seems unimaginable.
Hundreds of homes have been lost, nearly two score lives. Each given in defence of what we all value, home, family and thus each life lost in defence of us all. Before such an onslaught, it is only by fickle winds and fortunate rains that the destruction has not been more overwhelming.
From the Ashes: A poetry collection in support of the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfire relief effort is available from https://fromtheashes.maximumfelixmedia.com/. Proceeds from the sale of the anthology will go to support the ongoing care of Australia’s native wildlife through selected charities and wildlife organisations.
