Ben Hession
Ben Hession is a Wollongong-based writer. His poetry has appeared in Eureka Street, the International Chinese Language Forum, and Cordite, with work also to appear in the 25th anniversary anthology of Live Poets at the Don Bank Museum, Can I Tell You a Secret? In 2013, his poem “A Song of Numbers” was shortlisted for the Australian Poetry Science Poetry Prize. Ben is also a music journalist and is involved with community broadcasting.
Stuart Park Lagoon
After the storm, the stream breaches
the strand:
racing out skeletal branchlets;
racing out unconscious, plastic fragments
of suburbia.
Ostensibly still stands the lagoon,
the surface, tense with stillness,
a pelican breaks.
You can tell where to fish, watching a pelican —
an Aboriginal man had told me, once.
Where then, are the fishermen today, absent
from the overflowing water?