Almanac Poetry: The Girl in the Giant Wombat Tourist Shop
Well-known Australian ‘Big Things’. [Wikimedia Commons.]
The Girl in The Giant Wombat Tourist Shop
She was sixteen, enthusiastic,
grateful for the job,
pretty, green-eyed, brown-haired …
And what else for a teenage girl
who left school in Year Ten
in a one-horse town
but work in a two-storey wombat
next to a petrol station
selling souvenirs
to people travelling elsewhere?
(Acknowledgements: poem first appeared in Tamba magazine, 2006; then in my first collection, Vigorous Vernacular, Picaro Press, 2008, reprinted by Ginninderra Press, 2018.)
Read more from Kevin Densley HERE
Kevin Densley’s latest poetry collection, Sacredly Profane, is available HERE
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About
Kevin Densley is a graduate of both Deakin University and The University of Melbourne. He has taught writing and literature in numerous Victorian universities and TAFES. He is a poet and writer-in-general. His fifth book-length poetry collection, Please Feed the Macaws ... I'm Feeling Too Indolent, was published in late 2023 by Ginninderra Press. He is also the co-author of ten play collections for young people, as well as a multi Green Room Award nominated play, Last Chance Gas, published by Currency Press. Other writing includes screenplays for educational films.
You took me there KD. You took me there.
Thanks, DB. Glad I did. As you’d know, that’s the aim with pieces such as this.