Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note:

About the poem:

‘Sound Bridge’ collects moments — watching grainy footage of my son’s school choir singing the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem in Moravia on a music tour, the 2018 Tham Luang Nang Non cave rescue — and snippets of artworks (the first line of Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’, the last bars Mozart wrote, a snippet of Bob Dylan’s You Angel, You). The anatomy of the piano gave me something of a structure, along with ideas of strings (a piano’s wound strings, the rope out of the cave, and risky heart-strings) and the weave of loss, gain, love and mourning. 
The poem was awarded second place in Australian Catholic University’s Poetry Prize in 2018, the theme of which was empathy (allowing me to joke about winning second prize in the empathy competition). Judge Chris Wallace Crabbe described the poem as ‘crammed with music, as with life’s vitamins’.