This poem was performed with two voices at the 2010 Festival of Voice in Denmark, WA and won first place in the Poetry Slam Championship.
Stepping across slanted stone,
rimmed by marri and peppermint
and the crenellated calls of cormorant and swan,
the sun slides gold into our bones…
in a clearing the shape of a tear-drop.
Dolerite divided from itself into ancient tools.
Once pleated through crystalline granite—
Now the scattered artefacts of a people
that some say were never here.
“What a convenient way to take another’s land.”
At the quarry’s edge, I sit on a quilted coat
of green and brown moss, stitched with silver
and perforated with perfect blades of grass.
Time splits open and my skin turns black…
Once this clearing rose above a fertile valley.
Gazing at a lizard trap, I remember—
the bright simplicity of a connected life.
My friend stoops over a yamma hole
and tastes again the earth’s pooled tears…
It was a meeting place of many rivers.
Collecting the debris of careless sightseers,
My fingers are pricked by pincushion lilies—
Borya, resurrected out of desiccation,
through brilliant orange into green…
flaming umbilical from the water-deep land.
Published in Sunlight of Ordinary Days by Twelve Poets of the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre. (2014)
