The Mozzie

I am excited to have a poem in every magazine of The Mozzie this year (2021)!

summer anguish is in the January edition

water clock is in the February edition

when you can only take photos from the window is in the March edition

Thank you to Ron Heard for his dedication to Australian poets and poetry. I know for him there have been many hardships, loss and sadness, and maybe times it is not easy to go on but he

The Mozzie is a small press poetry magazine that publishes the work of established and emerging poets.

An independent poetry magazine, it publishes over 400 poems a year. 2017 will be its twenty-fifth year of publication. The Editor Ron Heard lives in Brisbane “among the heat, rain and roof possums”and is the author of the verse novel The Shadow of Troy which regular readers of The Mozzie followed episodically poem by poem , month by month .

It was reminescent of my wonderful Ancient History lessons at High School. In the final year I studied at the Honours level and our teacher was an elderly nun Mother Oliver IBVM * who had survived throat cancer and taught our small class of 4 girls by speaking into a megaphone that rested on the desk. We waited upon every whispered word and we loved our time with the text Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides, an Athenian historian who served as an Athenian general during the war. His account of the conflict is widely considered to be a classic and regarded as one of the earliest scholarly works of history. The History is divided into eight books and tells the story of the Peloponnesian War which was a war fought in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta—the two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece at the time (431 to 405 B.C.E.). This war shifted power from Athens to Sparta, making Sparta the most powerful city-state in the region.

Besides being a scholar and lover of Ancient History Mother Oliver was also the author of the story of Mother Gonzaga Barry IBVM , the founder of the Loreto Order of Religious Sisters in Australia which is called “Love is a Light Burden” by Mother M. Oliver, I.B.V.M. Published 1950. My signed copy is very precious and is one of the inspirations for my writing.

Memorising paragraphs of Thucydides like the above i can see how I developed my awareness of justice and deep belief in the following.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act. Dietrich Bonhoeffer