Before the rise

Winner of the 2025 AAWP x Ubud Writers and Readers Festival Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry

I am grateful to the Australasian Association of Writing Programs x Ubud Writers and Readers Festival for selecting this poem as the winner of their 2025 Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry.

Thank you also to Jen Webb, Deb Wain and Sarah Giles, editors at Meniscus, for publishing this work, along with its summer solstice companion, in their Volume 13 Issue 2.

The Erskine River meets the Southern Ocean at Lorne by the Great Ocean Road.

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Before the rise

After the annual winter solstice swim at Williamstown Beach

IV
LOW TIDE FLOW, so still and slow.
Greyred ripples of soft blue glow
hold a mirror to the city, and the sky, 
and life unspools in ribbons of memories.
Here I am again at the long end of our elliptical voyage,
the round morning moon yellow and playful;
I watch it glide
below the rocky groyne.
They say it’s always smiling,
but I say we’ve only seen its bright side.

III
SUNRISE like a fresh white peach
poached in an almost empty sky.
The sand looks like it should be warm
but it is stubborn, confused and cold.
Meanwhile, the seagulls sit like queens 
on their thrones of rocky gold,
regarding us with caution.
We do as we are told,
and the low tide makes the deep water wait
on our long walk out.

II
THE BAY is patient—
after a whole year 
what difference is a few more minutes?
Finally, the winter solstice,
its dark hands curling up my legs,
and higher, past my waist and chest,
those cool hands like a poultice
and I slip inside the mirror
to confront myself, and the things I say, 
and the awesome weight of the wintry bay.

I
THE SILHOUETTE of a container ship,
way over the lonely sea,
reminds me the wheels of the economy 
are careless of cosmic symmetry.
But I come to be transformed, or inspired,
like a lump of clay must be shaped, and fired,
and glazed; so I dive in and shut my eyes,
and see this longest of nights with its darkest of dreams.
Perhaps you could say that a part of me dies
at this lowest inflection before the rise.

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The judge’s report for the 2025 prize said some nice things about this poem:

‘Before the Rise’ catches the eye because of its backward structure—from stanza IV to I. Then for its arresting images from ‘greyed ripples of soft blue glow’ to ‘rocky groyne’ and the glorious ‘Sunrise like a fresh white peach / poached in an almost empty sky’ to ‘thrones of rocky gold’ and sudden turn to the speaker’s experiencing the solstice as ‘dark hands curling up my legs’ until the final insight ‘before the rise’.

Rhythm, however, is this poem’s subtle driver. Rewarding and gratifying, it is used to reinforce or underline nuances and inflections through judicious variations. And pauses. The ear attunes to this music-making. Spell-bound, it occurred to me that many people say they delight in poetry for its particular concentration. Its compression. Reading this ‘backward narrative poem’, though, confirmed to me that such sense of compression ironically derives from the way a poet uses silence to highlight particular words or phrases to make the reader re-think language and find new delight in it.

‘Before the Rise’ will cast its spell on many a reader.

Thank you for these kind words. After the last 12 months of being extensively published in my Notes app, and among my family and friends, it is encouraging to know that my writing may have something to offer a broader audience.

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