we lived without time then

when Lake St Clair blew to waves

that cabin luxury for us

wood table and chairs

the bunk off the floor

I was reading

Crime and Punishment

too young for temptation

we loved each other

no regret beneath our tan lines

in those days I could eat

a whole loaf and honey

the visiting heron had no song

in the rounds of its silent joy

just the thwack of happiness

you said I should read

The Ginger Man

while holding Jean-Paul’s trilogy

This poem was first published, translated into Farsi, in Persian Sugar in English Tea, a bilingual anthology of short poems and haikus edited by Soodebah Saeidnia and Aimal Zaman Yusufzai, and in Unstill Mosaics: The Book of Love, Loss, and Longing, Busybird Publishing, 2019.

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He has been shortlisted for the ACU National Poetry Prize, the MPU International Poetry Prize, The James Tate Prize, and the Ada Cambridge Prize. Five collections of his poetry have been published. He was nominated for ‘The Best of the Net’ 2019, and was a Pushcart Prize 2021 nominee. He is a winner of the Raw Art Review Chapbook Prize. His fifth poetry collection, Snail Mail Cursive, was published by Ginninderra Press in January 2023. Having spent a great part of his life in the Strzelecki ranges, the "part of Tasmania which didn’t break away from the mainland", he now resides in Wonthaggi in an Edwardian house which was once a small maternity hospital.