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i
You will get used to it, they said.
Open your eyes. These things are real. Accept
what you can’t change.The past is dead.
You have more work to do. All your inept
battles with nightmares wasted time.
Seasons and dancing happened while you slept.
Missing one moment is a crime.
Nothing you ever said or did has kept
oblivion in its place.
Oceans and fires and men have always swept
over the sacred. You must face
that all you can have is now. And then I wept.
ii
Rain in the sky is never bad
unless, of course there is a flood.
Watermarked walls signal places where
a farming family met despair.
Featureless dust shimmers to the smudge
of mirage horizon where cattle trudge
behind a tractor for scanty feed,
never sufficient for their need.
Lambs spread like garments on the clay
as raptors tug their flesh away.
The child who watches cannot know
the danger known to man and crow.
iii
City dwellers complain of prices
and dress up their cooking with Asian spices.
Fish is expensive and, they have read,
polluted as well, so the paper’s said.
Omega 3 versus heavy metals.
They’ll have to wait till the weather settles.
Bananas gone in a hurricane, rain
came hammering down then vanished again.
Grain crops germinate, then die
beneath the tourist-blue smiling sky.
I buy organic Italian pasta
to circumvent a worse disaster.
Vitamin pills are bought in stealth:
You’re all right as long as you’ve got your health.
iv
The voice on the radio gives no quarter:
Australia is running out of water.
Recycled effluent soon will be
the answer for your cup of tea.
“I know I’m silly,” said Aunty Jean,
“but I hate to think where the water’s been.”
The voice on the radio condescends.
It’s just a drink that you share with friends.
Water is measured by can and bucket
and only the dedicated have stuck it.
Native plants withstand the dry
and spare us glares from the passers by.
Water spies are like Stasi, snooping
to see whose garden is never drooping.
That’s drinking water you’re wasting on roses.
(There’s more to the neighbours than one supposes.)
Lawns are brown in the best of houses
and mowers set free from nagging spouses.
I live beside the brooding sea.
It may rise up to visit me.
A drought that drowns is a paradox
that casts our bread upon the rocks.
v
A flickering dark-skinned figure is almost seen
beyond the trees on my lawn.
It’s there for a moment then gone.
Illusion in the dawn
or something that might have been?
vi
I drove past a Murri woman who bore
her heavy shopping home from the store.
I wanted to offer to drive her home
but something about her made me become
tongue-tied and shy. I drove on past
and around the corner a bit too fast.
Fool, fool, such a simple human gift
as to offer another shopper a lift.
Her eyes were proud and her back was straight.
There was something haughty about her gait.
I feared she would answer, “It isn’t far
to the spot nearby where I parked my car.”
vii
Alone with Aboriginal poles in the gallery’s bowels,
I’m gripped by fear. They accuse me. I came
to ravage their land. I am to blame.
I am to blame. I chose to come.
Their weeping echoes from gallery walls.
Does new love ever displace the old?
Young wives move in when the bed gets cold.
The grass told King Midas’s secrets, and here
in this old, new land trees whispered fear.
And now the trees scream, fire, fire fire!
You must accept the funeral pyre.
The sky is black with the souls of birds
and trails of ink from unheeded words.
viii
Don’t get used to it, they said.
Open your eyes. These things are real. Accept
you have to change. Remember the dead.
They now depend on you. All your inept
justifications deepen your crime.
You have been faking rage while justice slept.
We have been waiting all the time.
None of your promises ever have been kept.
This is our only space.
Oceans and fires and wind have always swept
thieves from our sacred place.
You must return it now. I would, except...
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