Patched grass-sward pools
Reflect a glimpse of un-owned space 

A Spur-winged plover picks a trail
Where once incidents were duly filed

At a desk bar keeping the public peace,
Below, cells for malefactors (now filled in)

But who will bring to earth
This village of the air dreamt up

In the perches of some smart-eyed bird
Prepared to swoop on vacant land?

We wait and watch, cross paths
Locked in a shape-evading sprawl

Standing for the pastel shades
On drawing boards, to list and paint

Or not. The ACTION bus will whisk away
As doing time has left the scene

Now settled sediment of suspended day
That held what is to come accused

Of consorting with what had once been

6dec2023sh.

*Belconnen Police Station that was

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.

A few words you said lay out the line,

As searched along, let out, teased, stretched, tied

An incendiary breath you said or did not say

So vacancy remains, scratched on the face before me;

Nil to add, yet contains somewhere a note of bliss –

Even the thought of it makes me happy.

You know, it skims the case, causes minutes to recede a little slower,

Escaped while skipping a moment’s work or thought or drive …

Beaumarchais, needing the exposure, builds the piece for a king and claims it for himself,

An exquisite folly to an ancienne regime, resting on borrowed time and music of the gods.

Slips to mind so I too can scrape a judgement from barrel lees

let these seconds cry, a reckless moment hung

On an average afternoon on an average day,

One that is measured in advance to carry weight.

But no joy in motion still It rests, and might misplay the steady passing beat,

That nails us to a solid sunny post with just a thread of doubt each way.

A moody shadow hides the hare, long crippled by the heat,

Time tracks its fate. Too late its passed that way.

Note: refers to the poem “Hare in Summer” by Flexmore Hudson, published in Australian Poets Speak, eds Colin Thiele and Ian Mudie, Rigby, 1961

In the street in foul mood sunk

I passed a tree, of character I thought,

Whose sprawled and tortured trunk

Reeked of darkness, tempers taut

/So I paused and asked him thus

What ails thee mighty boscodies

He turned his head, and in a husk-

y voice Intoned his piece

/My days on earth appear cut short

The winter’s here, and no more do I

Appear to fit the standards taught

For street trees, smooth of limb and high

/So you see,  bland is the fate 

Bureaucracies

Have handed down. Proclaimed now at any rate

My rootedness is deemed to cease

/It pains me thus to make my peace 

Sure,  long age liberates the soul

From up and up of callow youth,

But more than that it grates my bole

/No heed to deep patrimony

I’m just a staid  embarrassment

To assuage the street-proud folk that see

Through mycorrhizal pediment

/They found better uses for the space

Curbed in concrete no light no air

To distract  the carapaced

Commuter, left nondescript a square

/Of greeny stuff, in sculpt’ arraying

Tendered and tamed and plaqued

Will more fittingly assuage the sting 

To payIng the privilege of a metered park 

/On come the lights,  the sun soon dips

My shoulders now brushed clean,

So still-sapped limbs can turn to chips

While only saw fly larvae keen.

/But if a fragrant oily spectre

Comes to haunt the city skies

Reflect how a carbon steely sector

Replaced a bosky compromise

/31may 2022