from the editor's desk
‘Approaching the Ocean’ by Paul Hetherington
This poem was originally published in Westerly Online Special Issue (OSI16): Oceans. This Special Issue of Westerly is an exciting collaboration with The UWA Oceans Institute, guest-edited by Prema Arasu. Contributors include scientists from the OI alongside literary luminaries and emerging WA writers.
OSI16 is available to download in its entirety for free here.
Paul Hetherington has published eighteen full-length collections of poetry, including Sleeplessness, which won the inaugural Marion Halligan Award in 2024. He founded International Poetry Studies at the University of Canberra and the International Prose Poetry Project. With Cassandra Atherton he co-authored Prose Poetry: an introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Approaching the Ocean
1. Hands
Our rented half-house leans into its street, the local butcher sells us offcuts. Days became a glare of light, weeks dissolve. The palm of your hand imprints the sand and presses grains on my shoulder. The Indian Ocean washes our bodies. Our infant daughter wakes every few hours and her nuzzling cries clamber in dreams. You place oily hands on her downy body. Our clock ticks slowly—days and nights drip through fingers, as if we feel the seconds and minutes slide.
2. Mangroves
Homed-in, belonging to this place, we look outwards toward cliff and ocean; toward the road away from the old, crowded town. We place a tablecloth and carpets, clean the skylight, hang paintings from angling walls. One image shows a boy and girl among mangroves at the ocean’s root-bound edge. They’re digging for crabs with sticks, beyond fencelines and land claims, feet firmly planted in sea and mud. They’re alert, as if to say, ‘We belong where the mangroves remain.’ Walking outside, you ask what we’re doing and why we’ve come. I’ve no answer, as the sky peers. Trees crowd us and our feet are sinking.
3. Opacity
Cumbrous feeling gathers and dissolves; days are as opaque, like an abstract image. We face the ocean; behind us are houses, a road we know well, a shop that sells hand-me-down clothes. We look toward an idea, between shop front and shore, gusting in a sketch of wind.
