Over there loiters the Kurnell literal
Where dunes once decked the bay
with snow

What’s left? low mounds hide drums of oil
Refined, sleekly grey but ageing,
Rapidly, as was the fashion

Plaguing the millenia upon millenia
As we now plague ours, displacing
A docile hour sparkling In the spring tide

Contrails like ghosts of passing tars
Harbour hopes of home
Reflected in the green shallow gut of water

An invisible trace
Marks our stride over sleeping land,
Compiled with our being by accident.

Beneath me now the slumbering hide
Of another earth,
Unseen and indifferent; our fate

As the fate of reefs past, of the teeming
Mastheads of ocean life feeding off
The cycle; as we feed.

Above, white clouds, shaken of shame
Still there, is that ghosted memory
In the Bay of Snows, a once was

Will be again, a reed bed made
That will tell its tale, soon,
Quite unintended, sheeted home

13 September 2015

Reference is to “Beyond Capricorn”, by Peter Trickett, that explores the likelihood of a Portuguese fleet charting the east coast of Australia in the early 16th century anticipating Cook’s rediscovery for the British a quarter millennium later. Both parties had something to say about what we now know as Botany Bay.