Judith Bishop

Judith Bishop was born in 1972 and grew up in Pakenham, Victoria, on the then-border between rural Gippsland and suburbia. She remembers the long grass paddocks in front of her house and the sweetish smell that used to drift by from the livestock feed factory located near the town centre. Her first book of poems, Event (Salt Publishing), arrived in 2007, and won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award. Judith now lives in Sydney with her husband and baby daughter.

Freight and flight

Dawn heat, tarred sky

pink-striped on the horizon

beyond the lights of Darwin and the coast.

My rig sails into this air as though

weightless, two cars tall,

like a low-flying plane, skimming

the highway at the leaf-height

of the woollybutt,

dust clouds streaming,

gauges twitching to the forces

gently carrying me seated

like a gull wafted by a thunderstorm.

Driving this B-double, I’m as lusty

as Apollo, when he hitched his shining chariot,

the sun:

all the dazzlement

of power

focused in the steering column,

fierce stars arrowing

from the polished bull bar,

and a load that could crush me

a hundred times over –

but follows me

docile as a cloud.