Holding Stillness: Millie Foster on Endings, Intimacy, and the Spaces Between
Small moments often hold the deepest truths, and that’s where Millie Foster’s poetry finds its pulse. Working between Liverpool and Boorloo/Perth, Australia, she writes with a sensitivity to the subtle shifts that shape our lives: the fleeting expressions, the soft hesitations, the emotional afterglow of an evening we thought was ordinary.
Her work thrives in the quiet, in those fragile thresholds where one chapter prepares to close and another hasn’t yet announced itself.
Anticipation, her contribution to the Poetry Project 52 for 26, is rooted in exactly such a moment. A simple dinner party, friends gathered, conversation humming, becomes the backdrop for a deeper emotional recognition. Eighteen months into her Liverpool life, Foster found herself negotiating the gap between detachment and acceptance, sensing the early tremors of an ending long before it was spoken aloud.
The poem holds that sensation gently, examining the stillness that exists just before something shifts…
In a beautifully understated move, Foster invites “god” into this liminal space, not as a judge or arbiter, but as a fellow presence feeling the same quiet ache of what’s approaching. It’s an intimate reimagining of the divine, placing it at the table, sharing in the hush rather than observing from afar.
The final stanza releases the poem’s held breath. Rain arrives like a soft unravelling, carrying the tension away. Foster closes with silence, a small, deliberate pause that mirrors the emotional weight of waiting for change, and the calm that follows once the moment finally breaks.
This is Foster at her most compelling: attentive, precise, and unafraid to explore the emotional resonance of the seemingly mundane. In her hands, even the smallest scene becomes a doorway into something larger, something quietly transformative.
Anticipation
You’ve fallen through the end of the earth.
Okay.
You’ve fallen through the end of the earth.
So, what now?
A perfect bowl of strawberries in the centre of a table,
red as the day you were born.
Wet with water from the tap in Beth’s kitchen.
Wet with anticipation of their own undoing.
These fruits have fallen, too.
To the end of their earth.
Their green stems removed from their bodies
—juicy, plump, seeded—before day’s end.
You notice your mouth. Wet with anticipation
that something else’s ending is down to you.
You find yourself empathising
with the god you now imagine sat amongst clouds,
wet with anticipation of your own undoing.
The pair of you dripping from mouth corners.
And then the rain starts.
Silence —
MILLIE FOSTER
