Isabella G Mead

Isabella G Mead’s debut poetry collection, The Infant Vine, was published in 2024 by UWAP. Her work has also appeared in Meanjin, Island, Griffith Review, Westerly, Cordite and Anthropocene. In 2024, she won the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize. She lives, writes and raises her children on unceded Wurundjeri land.

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Waiting for Stone to Move

Between death and more death—a life. 

Foam, fishing nets, the small, perfect feet 

fleshed in stone. Forget the likely ending, 

marble too cruel a tomb for grandmother’s anguish.

Instead, rest a while on the hand that grasps 

the sodden cloth, the parted lips 

and the breath waiting like a tiny seabird

between tongue and so palate—

a storm petrel whose wings will carry him 

thirty years through untroubled moonlight, 

over swells and deep blue currents, endless 

tableaux of ships and illuminated fish.

Though the bird’s legs are barely strong enough

to walk on land, at sea he is oiseau du diable. 

And here, in the cold mouth of a boy—a wish, a do-over. 

When the ocean calls, the bird flies out.

after a storm;

after Sarah Bernhardt’s ‘Après la tempête’ (ca. 1876);

after

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