Poetry

I can’t wish on stars in unseasonal cold. / They’re older than they look. / And they keep shtum in shivery night / even when I sneak up on them. / Still they spread a stern and spiky glow / on my uneven thinking about / how things turned out, horizon / to horizon, birth to dust.

Language no longer speaks to me. / Though I see its many bodies, I cannot be / Reached. When I return, I shudder in this God-given air / Praise what remains. Outside, a man has built a kookaburra / Fifteen feet tall, and put a laugh inside / Big enough for the world. I watch as the icon meets its makers / And they join in laughing.

Linear time / is something Settlers brought here / A version of time / that creates distance / Things that happened / a hundred years ago / are further away / than things that happened yesterday / A version of time / weaponised against Indigenous peoples / Our life ways / called ‘backward’ / the past not of the future

At five, the doors click shut. Security / walks a final circuit and clocks off. The eyes / of the prominent are lost in the middle distance / beyond office, sports field or studio. Hair and skin / of oil, watercolour, polymer, the reassurance / of names everyone should know. Not ours / we are without shelter, without conservation. / But they cannot keep us out.

I tried to grieve, / I tried not to cough. I couldn’t sleep or I slept too much. / I tried to believe that words were enough, but I wore / them through. There was nothing to do, or everything to do / and no one to touch. It was a communal crisis of the flesh / yet I lost mine in the wash, lost sense of the seasons / and the earth and the feeling of the turn as the world shrank down / to assorted squares of sound and sight.