A forest lays ahead of you, and a forest lay behind you.

How much forest there is you don’t know,

what’s on the other end? Light? Dark? Pain and sorrow?

Yet to think about the end seems distant, now you only see a vista of gloaming tenebrosity, as dusk bounces fractals of lambent fulguration off of gently swaying eucalypts.

You can hear squalls of immense downpour in the canopy above, yet no water can infiltrate past the chuppah of leaves and branches, creating a phantasmagorical reality, almost detached from your mind itself,

as what you hear seems to misalign with what your brain says.

As the dusk finishes its nightly transition to darkness turns the biblical panorama into a Kafkaesque prison, obscuring all forms of light.

No longer can you see ahead of you, and no longer can you tell if you’re moving in the correct direction. It’s all guesswork as the Gaia gazes upon your blind desperation,

in a way that only omniscience can.

She watches as you mistake vines for monstrous tentacles, seemingly harmless branches turn to razors as you leave them in your hasty wake.

As each insignificant wound snowballs with frequency, you wonder why you’re fleeing.

Fleeing? From what? A past mistake? A future mistake? Fleeing? Or simply traveling?

Welts and incisions accrue upon your appendages as you stumble over branch and bramble.

All of this makes you wonder why even move? Surely moving at this point would be ludicrous? And where is everyone else? Are you alone? Or are people around? Just beyond the caliginous radius? If you yell will they hear? Or are they as impaired as you?

Some say that the easiest way out of the forest is to dig. But the ground is hard, compact, or mud. To dig six feet here would be almost as hard as finding the accursed border.

It's tempting.

Very tempting.

As you sit at the base of a monstrous Antarctic Beech, its ancient trunk propping you up.

Is this what happens when you stop moving? You become a part of the environment rather than being a guest, as Gaia claims what she is owed by your trespass.

So, what is beyond the accursed border of this here anathematic bocage?

People previous to you have told great stories of what lay beyond your sight.

You’ve seen short videos of other folks, sometimes it seems as though they see more than you. Everyone knows more than you, a joke that you don't get. Or are you the joke?

You are so small, dwarfed by the trunk on which you rest.

So small...

Why find the end?

Is it the Eden you've been promised? Or the land of Zion? Valhalla? Avalon?

Or more woods.

Is it worth traversing the rest of the woods to find out?

Or should you slumber beneath the giant beech?

Because you cannot see forwards, and you're losing memory of what lay behind you.

Will you wither against the forest as you seek in vain for the sweet end?

Will you grow roots, and watch many more like you face these very questions?

Will the sun finally rise? Because you've been left without light for too long.

THIS ISN’T MY POEM.

This is Robert Gray’s poem, he wrote this wonderful piece of writing, and I wanted to have more people other than Australian HSC kids get to appreciate such a masterpiece.

My mother all of ninety has to be tied up in her wheelchair, yet still she leans far out of it sideways; she juts there brokenly, able to cut with the sight of her someone who is close. She is hung like her hanging mouth in the dignity of her bleariness, and says that she is perfectly all right. It’s impossible to get her to complain or to register anything for longer than a moment. She has made Stephen Hawking look healthy. It’s as though she is being sucked out of existence sideways through a porthole and we’ve got hold of her feet. She’s very calm. If you live long enough it isn’t death you fear but what life can still do. And she appears to know this somewhere even if there’s no hope she could formulate it. Yet she is so calm you think of an immortal - a Tithonus withering forever on the edge of life, though never a moment’s grievance. Taken out to air my mother seems in a motorcycle race, she the sidecar passenger who keeps the machine on the road, trying to lie far over beyond the wheel. Seriously, concentrated, she gazes ahead towards the line, as we go creeping around and around, through the thick syrups of a garden, behind the nursing home. Her mouth is full of chaos. My mother revolves her loose dentures like marbles ground upon each other, or idly clatters them, broken and chipped. Since they won’t stay on her gums she spits them free with a sudden blurting cough, that seems to have stamped out of her an ultimate breath. Her teeth fly into her lap or onto the grass, breaking the hawsers of spittle. What we see in such age is for us the premature dissolution of a body, as it slips off the bones and back to protoplasm before it can be decently hidden away. And it’s as though the synapses were almost all of them broken between her brain cells and now they waver about feebly on the draught of my voice and connect at random and wrongly and she has become a surrealist poet. ‘How is the sun on your back?’ I ask. ‘The sun is mechanical,’ she tells me, matter of fact. Wait a moment, I think, is she becoming profound? From nowhere she says, ‘The lake gets dusty.’ There is no lake here, or in her past. ‘You’ll have to dust the lake.’ It could be that she is, but then she says, ‘The little boy in the star is food,’ or perhaps ‘The little boy is the star in food,’ and you think, ‘More likely this appeals to my kind of superstition.’ It is all a tangle, and interpretations, and hearing amiss, all just the slipperiness of her descent. We sit and listen to the bird-song, that is like wandering lines of wet paint and like dabs of it, that is like an abstract expressionist at work - his flourishes, and reflectiveness, and then the touches barely there - and that is going on all over the stretched sky. If I read aloud skimmingly from the newspaper, she immediately falls asleep. I stroke her face and she wakes and looking at me intently she says something like, ‘That was a nice stick.’ In our sitting about she has also said, relevant of nothing, ‘The desert is a tongue.’ ‘A red tongue?’ ‘That’s right, it’s a it’s a sort of you know - it’s a - it’s a long motor car.’ When I told her I might go to Cambridge for a time, she said to me, ‘Cambridge is a very old seat of learning. Be sure - ’ but it became too much - ‘be sure of the short Christmas flowers.’ I get dizzy, nauseous, when I try to think about what is happening inside her head. I keep her out there for hours, propping her straight, as she dozes, and drifts into waking; away from the stench and the screams of the ward. The worst of all this, for me, is that despite such talk, now is the most peace I’ve known her to have. She reminisces, momentarily, thinking I am one of her long-dead brothers. ‘Didn’t we have some fun on those horses, when we were kids?’ she’ll say, giving her thigh a little slap. Alzheimer’s is nirvana, in her case. She never mentions anything of what troubled her adult years - God, the evil passages of the Bible, her own mother’s long, hard dying, my father. Nothing at all of my father, and nothing of her obsession with religion, that he drove her to. She says the magpie’s song, that goes on and on, like an Irishman wheedling to himself, which I have turned her chair towards, reminds her of a cup. A broken cup. I think that the chaos in her mind is bearable to her because it is revolving so slowly - slowly as dust motes in an empty room. The soul? The soul has long been defeated, is all but gone. She’s only productive now of bristles on the chin, of an odour like old newspapers on a damp concrete floor, of garbled mutterings, of some crackling memories, and of a warmth (it was always there, the marsupial devotion), of a warmth that is just in the eyes now, particularly when I hold her and rock her for a while, as I lift her back to bed - a folded package, such as, I have seen from photographs, was made of the Ice Man. She says, ‘I like it when you - when when you…’ I say to her, ‘My brown-eyed girl.’ Although she doesn’t remember the record, or me come home that time, I sing it to her: ‘Da da-dum, da-dum…And it’s you, it’s you,’ - she smiles up, into my face - ‘it’s you, my brown-eyed girl.’ My mother will get lost on the roads after death. Too lonely a figure to bear thinking of. As she did once, one time at least, in the new department store in our town; discovered hesitant among the aisles; turning around and around, becoming a still place. Looking too kind to reject even a wrong direction, outrightly. And she caught my eye, watching her, and knew I’d laugh and grinned. Or else, since many another spirit will be arriving there, whatever those are - and all of them clamorous as seabirds, along the walls of death - she will be pushed aside easily, again. There are hierarchies in Heaven, we remember; and we know of its bungled schemes. Even if ‘the last shall be first’, as we have been told, she could not be first. It would not be her. But why become so fearful? This is all of your mother, in your arms. She who now, a moment after your game, has gone; who is confused and would like to ask why she is hanging here. No - she will be safe. She will be safe in the dry mouth of this red earth, in the place she has always been. She who hasn’t survived living, how can we dream that she will survive her death?

Robert Gray

It was the 13. Dragoner Division had the dubious honor of being thrown straight into the fire at the beginning of the war. Now, whilst Magdeburg would end in a victory for the Holy Roman Army (HRA), it would break the 13. Dragoner Divison to the point that it was no longer considered combat-ready for about a year. The capture of the regimental armory at the beginning of the battle made sure that the fight would bog down into a slog of small arms, with little to no support from the LIA (Light Infantry Artillery). The Armoury was a perfect position to fortify and establish a frontline slicing the industrial south of the city to the mainly rural and agricultural north, which was one of the main sources of food for the revolutionaries.

Now it is worth noting that while we were stuck in Magdeburg the HRA and the German Revolutionary Army were racing each other to attempt to encircle the enemy half of the city. This resulted in a line of defenses, mainly trenches and hastily constructed forts made out of repurposed farmhouses that passed the south of Berlin and terminated on the western edge of the Dabie lake (west of Szczecin) on the eastern front (everywhere east of Magdeburg), and stretched all the way to Rotterdam in the west (this formed the western front) with a bulge going south of Cologne. However, this futile race to outflank each other would go on for about a year and a half, with Rotterdam being cut in half with the frontline remaining on each side of the Rhine. Again, GRA in the north, and the HRA in the south. However we were oblivious to this, it came down to my regiment to retake the Armoury in Magdeburg, and attempt to recover and repair as much equipment as possible.

This was no easy task, however, as the Armoury was designed to be easily fortified in a pinch. The building itself was made out of 50cm thick concrete with steel reinforcements. There were windows with steel shutters facing the south and the north. The only entrances were via a tunnel heading north, and the southward facing the main entrance, which leads into a short corridor which had a porthole at the inner end of it which the enemy used to install a Machine Gun. The standard MG used by the HRA at the time was the MG 97, a licensed design of the Winchester arms Machine Rifle 95, and it was more than capable of tearing apart any poor soul to attempt to breach the main hall. The 2. Companie Learned this the hard way after the first assault on the building, which ended in the destruction of 2. Zug and heavy casualties from the rest of the formation. We had no artillery, little ammo, no support as the rest of the HRA was tied up attempting to encircle the city, and it looked like we were going to have to besiege the building... after we dug in, the morale destroying malaise of siege mentality told us the here was our home for the foreseeable future.

I only remember a few certain points clearly, these memories of mine penetrate the mind-numbing boredom of the siege’s merging days. However, these few key events do require explanation. The first of these is the aforementioned domed first assault. Now, I apologize in advance for the sudden change of perspective, but I’m a soldier... not a writer.

I was on the 5th floor of ‘The Grand’, which was one of the major hotels, usually giving sanctuary to the aristocracy during trips or meetings. But now, since it overlooked the park outside the Armoury from about 2 kilometers away, it was the perfect temporary Regimental HQ. I was working with my Kapitän and Oberst, I forget their names (which I will explain as to why soon), and we were mulling over the situation. We didn’t know the strength of the enemy, nor how much ammo and food they had, or even we were besieging alone position or just a stronghold that was a part of a major frontline. All of our comms were either outdated telegraph systems, and we had yet to find the location of the Brigade HQ, Let alone the Divisional one considering that they were supposed to be where we knew the enemy had overrun. So to be frank, we didn’t know anything about the enemy, or really even anything that was directly under the command of 4. Regiment.

So, considering that we initially thought that this was an isolated revolt and that we’d have major support soon enough we decided that a quick assault to prevent enemy entrenchment was the way to go. So, I was assigned to lead 3. Zug of 3. Companie. 1. Companie would keep to the left flank and guard the approach to the HQ, while 3. Companie would do the same for the right flank. It was the job of 2. Companie, who got extra reinforcements, to breach the armory through the main entrance. We had a basic inventory of what was in the armory at the time, including a bunch of rifles, several MG 97′s about 2 broken Gewehr 10′s. (Semi-automatic squad firepower weapons. They had a 2 man crew, 1 loader, and 1 gunner) Luckily we had the other 7, so we could use the high power support. (For reference the StandardGewehr 1900 used an 8mm bullet with about 1400m range, half of that is the most accurate range. The Gewehr used a 1.1cm bullet with 1500m of accurate fire range, and a max of 3000m) We assigned 1 Gewehr 10 each for 1. and 3. Companie, and we gave grenades to 2. Companie. So this added up to about 400 men assaulting 1 building... easy right?

The downfall of the assault came down to the old HRE tradition of officers “honorably leading from the front”! So, the Oberst and the Kapitän took their positions with 2. Companie just before the attack (They weren’t at the direct front, it was officerly enough to just be in the first 100 or so men). Our staging areas were just behind the buildings south of the plaza, the plaza itself was more of a field with a couple of trees and some water features, not much cover. This was before the siege really took effect and the plaza became a maze of rubble and trenches. So, at 1800, just as the sun had disappeared behind the skyline of the buildings, bayonets were affixed, fire support in place, and the whistle blew.

for the first 100m or so there was no enemy fire until we closed within about 200m of the armory itself. Then all hell broke loose. Several MG 97′s tore through the ranks of 2. Companie, 1.1cm bullets destroying men and material alike. The NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers) had it the worst. they were trained to boost morale and to get the men charging onwards... standing strong in the face of fire with God as their only protection. Until they were blown apart by several bullets. However we pushed on bravely, I led my men around the inner side of the right flank and managed to get my Gewehr 10′s to suppress some of the fire coming from the second floor of the building. at approx 1810hrs we started to take some fire coming from some of the buildings from our right flank. A lot of the men from 2. Zug (3. Companie) didn’t have any cover from that direction, and in a panic they jumped their cover to take shelter from the fire coming from their right, only to get obliterated from the MG’s coming from the Armoury. So, with Bayonets affixed and my pistol drawn I lead my men into the buildings to clear them out. The Fighting was hand to hand, room to room, I was the second entering the foyer of the closest building with a definite enemy presence. As I leaped into the foyer the man in front of me, Gefreiter Werner his name was (I remember his name because he was top of the marksmanship, initiative, and voted “The best Looking of the Regiment”) took around to the knee and had his leg fold in the wrong direction. The man who’d fired the round was (luckily for me) using an old Gewehr 71, a single shot bolt action rifle. So as he was reloading I fired two rounds from my Revolver into his chest and right shoulder. He slumped to the floor smearing the blood on the wall behind him. Me and the rest of squad 1, (squad 2. and 3. were clearing the other buildings and/or laying down covering fire), started to clear the building room by room. This was the first time I’d ever been in hand to hand combat before, and I owe my life to the men who fought alongside me. One particular time I was separated in a long corridor, I was assaulted by an enemy with a war-pick. He got me a good one in the ribs before I could get a shot off, and we tumbled to the floor in a mess of flailing limbs. He managed to get on top of me and disarmed me of my knife, trying to stab me in my neck. We struggled for what seemed like hours until his head exploded covering me in this sticky grey matter, (which I later defined as his brains), and blood. The Gefreiter at the end of the corridor gave me a hand up, and we met the rest of the squad on the mezzanine floor, the only casualties we’d taken in the struggle to secure the building was Werner, who later bled to death through the various dressings and bandages we applied, and 3 others who’d caught a grenade. A Stabsgefreiter and I decided to take a look from the windows to see how the assault had gone. The man with me (Stabsgefreiter Gottingen) later describes the scene in his diary, which I read after his death later in the war. It read:

“The carnage my superior and I viewed was a sight sickening and demoralizing even to the hardiest of warriors. The once green field now ran with streams of blood making this sticky mud that wounded men slipped around in as they tries to duck for cover. The cries of men, barely audible over the deafening thunder of the MG 97′s and other weapons, as men disemboweled, with limbs almost fully amputated desperately made bids for cover. Some simply trying to get themselves fatally shot to end their pain. Their once-proud white, yellow, and grey uniforms are now eternally stained with blood-soaked mud. Once any man had reached the objective, the main entrance, rushed in simply to have parts of themselves spat back out in a mist of blood and a shower of gore.”

It was after viewing this I ordered my squad to run to the other platoons or squads, to order a withdraw. I could see that we were going to get nowhere with this, and continuing to charge would only end in more lives lost. I took it upon myself to notify the 2. Companie and try to find the Oberst. Once I’d reloaded my pistol I rushed for about 10 meters, only to be forced to dive to a prone position to take cover from the hail of lead. It was just as I caught sight of the Käpitan, who was attempting to review the situation from behind a small brick wall that was about waist high. I yelled out to him several times before he caught my eye. I signaled to him that we were retreating but he couldn’t understand me, so I made yet another mad dash to his cover. I managed to not get hit (somehow) and I explained the situation to him. He seemed to agree with my plan and ordered his runner to notify everyone he could. the Käpitan and I thought it was best to get back to our lines as quickly as possible so as to make sure that we could reorganize the units that would have successfully withdrawn. We gave ourselves a count of three to rush back to the next piece of cover. As soon as I raised myself to a crouching position, I sprinted back, and vaulted over the cover to safety, although I hadn’t noticed that I was coated in the Käpitans viscera. He must’ve taken a bullet on the way. Well, now that I was acting under the now-deceased Käpitans orders, and the Oberst was nowhere to be found, I was in command. At this point, I could see the withdrawal order was starting to take an effect. Men still feel though, all around the place. The fleeing survivors covered in blood.

Funnily enough, the engineers, who weren’t a part of the assault, and had nothing to do did what they do best... and dug trenches. Each street leading to the armory from the south (which was where we controlled) had a trench and some rudimentary sandbag bunkers. Upon being asked how they dug trenches through a cobbled road, Oberstabsgefreiter Wilhelm simply answered with, “with our entrenching tools sir”, ( I later learned that the cobbles were relatively easy to shift by levering them up with the tool, but that took me about a week of befuddlement to find it out). I also feel it pertinent to add that the only ones of our unit to survive the entire war, start to finish was me, who ended the war as an Oberst, Wilhelm, who ended the war as an Oberstabsfeldwebel, and about 7 others out of the 3000 that were in Magdeburg at the time of the revolution.

So... here we were, about 800m from our objective, with approximately 300 or so bodies lying, spattered and scattered in the field before us, in these small trenches, about 1.8m deep, we had no idea where anyone was, and when we were going to get reinforced. It was then I realized that I was stuck here for a while.

There’s this girl,

that I always adored.

Her hair is beautiful,

and she has an immaculate form.

She always goes to the same coffee shop,

at ten-to-six,

and half-past four.

And oh, I do so very much wish.

For a day, just one.

I could follow her,

out of the shop,

down the street.

I just wish

that I could see what she thinks of me.

Alas, she probably not a thought

for the man who only seems to exist

solely to give her a flat white.

But it is this day,

a most peculiar event occurred.

After a depressed and drunken stupor,

I awake to the sight of...

nothing?

I lay in my bed,

Yet I cannot see myself.

Wait...

Yes.

This is what I need.

I can see her.

But she’ll never see me.

Call my boss,

and tell them I’m sick.

And, at exactly ten-to-six.

There she is...

she doesn’t see me.

Not behind the counter

or behind her.

She...

Doesn’t notice my disappearance.

She patiently collects her drink.

and walk down the road.

Just like every other day...

except that I’ll follow her.

I’ll see what she wants in a man,

I’ll change myself in whatever image she wants to see.

Turns out she’s a graphic designer.

Crestfallen,

despairing,

I watch her work.

So beautiful...

She deserves more...

She deserves me.

As I watch her perfect hands create immaculate images,

The man in the office to my right gives her a look.

No...

It can’t be.

Competition.

As the clock strikes four the office empties.

The chattering dies.

But it seems that my love is still working.

Brushing her laptop with a stylus, in masterful strokes.

I’m so enthralled that I nearly miss the man walking towards me.

He looks perfect,

It must be some deception.

I’d have no chance of winning her against him.

He traverses the office and stands behind her.

He leans down.

She turns her head.

They kiss.

I can’t watch it.

My love, that is supposed to be me.

He is stealing her heart.

It

Belongs

to

ME.

As I look pointedly at the desk I’m leaning on I can hear their advances.

The sounds of love,

and of pleasure.

I must leave.

I shouldn’t be here.

This is perverse.

However...

Maybe I’m perverse.

I turn my head to view them,

She’s topless,

Even more beautiful than I could imagine.

So perfect,

those should be mine...

He should not have her.

She is mine,

MINE alone.

The desk of which I support myself with,

Has a Stanley knife in the pen holder.

My vexation,

the sounds of her with...

that man.

Fury,

rage.

He’ll feel my wrath.

Without thinking my hand in one swoop

takes the small knife,

as I rush forward.

I must protect her.

So it is all out of love,

that I drive the blade into the neck of the beast,

the warm blood sprays out.

It splatters on my face.

She views my bloody silhouette.

Too stunned to scream

as the sputtering,

shrieking,

writhing thing besides me begins to fade away.

All out of love,

I must be with her,

to protect her.

Forever.

So it is out of love,

my blade passes through her neck.

It’s justified, right?

I did this for her.

Her blood pours down.

It doesn’t stop.

She stares at me.

The bloody monster I am.

But I’m her monster.

I must complete my mission.

If I am to protect her forevermore

I must sacrifice myself to be with her.

As the life drains from her eyes.

She slumps.

My knees buckle.

I kneel.

My hand which possesses my blade,

swiftly travels into my throat.

Pain...

What have I done?

This is what she felt?

It is these thoughts which replay in my head like a broken tape...

I feel faint,

I can’t breathe.

All out of love,

My vision goes dark.

All for her. To protect her. To be with... Her.

My sacrifice for her...

All

out

of

Love.

What are we, if not for our fear.

Our ideas, our successes, and our failures, all because why?

Fear?

Certainly my friend.

For each action taken is not for love or greed.

For covetousness, or euphoria.

No, my friend. It is all out of fear.

You never find a soulmate for the love,

for the feeling of a warm embrace.

You do it for the fear of being alone.

That deep-seated, fear of Vulnerability.

My friend.

Fear is dyed-in-the-wool of humanity,

so to speak,

friend.

It’s at the root of all actions.

All actions.

What about greed you ask?

Ah, this gets most.

See... friend.

For it not being the fear of having naught,

or for having less than they-who-are next to you,

you would ne’re lie, cheat, steal... execute your brethren.

If it were not for the fear that you will be left behind,

as the carriage of opportunity to merely waltz on past.

That fear.

’Tis at the root of all.

...

Friend,

Are you convinced?

Or still, you believe these pathetic fallacies of emotion?

Still, shall you believe that what it is you do is done for what you want?

Or to avoid that you fear.

You collect meaningless pieces of paper and alloy,

pah.

Why?

Are you scared to go without food?

Without shelter?

Without love?

All violence

You think the soldier lays down their life for love?

For what.

For large tracts of dirt and vegetation?

What is there to love?

When thou hast drenched the soil in the blood of your species?

You think the soldier dispatches of innocents for love?

For greed?

For sadistic satisfaction?

No my...

Acquaintance.

He does it for the fear of what you will do he fails to.

He does it for the fear of your reprisal.

When you survive and return the oh so bloody favor.

Out of the simple,

primitive,

primeval...

fear.

That autochthonous driving factor of all that we are.

Not convinced...

‘mate’.

Why is it that every day untold millions of people pray?

Why do they want to go to a better place?

When your mortal coil is inevitably snuffed?

Why is it that we seem to clamor like lemmings

all for the possible...

possible

warranty of a heaven?

Because we are in fear,

all-encompassing,

ever gripping,

ne’re ceasing,

primordial piece of us,

that dictates the very course of our lives,

our futures,

and our history.

Yes, that is our history.

The story of us.

Fear Evermore.

Fear Evermore.

Genre: I don’t know. That’s for the audience (and you) to decide.

Age range: 16+ would be the best to read and think about the poem in an intellectual fashion.

Word Count: Approx 415 words.

Author Name: Ooooh, this appears to be a mystery.

Why is this project a good fit? I don’t know what it’s meant to fit into. So if I’ve answered a question that’s meant to be a story to sell, then this probably isn’t it.

The Hook: If I’ve done this right, then the first line should make for at least a decent hook, basically by calling out the reader and making them think about the driving factors their own emotions.

Synopsis: The Poem is the monologue of an unknown person. Giving insight and debate into the role that fear has played in humanity. However, as a silent audience disagrees their tone becomes less friendly, and they begin to use increasingly violent examples. Possibly out of the fear that their audience will not understand.

Target Audience: People who like poetry, philosophy, and intellectual discussion... I think.

Bio: OooOOooOoh... another mystery.

Education: Ditto

Hobbies: Well, apart from this another mystery.

Writing Style: I don't know. Another thing for the audience and our all-powerful overlords of "the judges" to determine.

Hometown: Surprise! It's Albania. (It's not. It's another mystery. )