 |
 |
This picks up some of the imagry here - it's an excerpt from a poem I wrote a couple of years ago called November Burning (attentive listees of course will recall that November is not bushfire season, but there was some reason for that...) Best Alison ___ what is it that I can't remember if I was young if I was ignorant the door suddenly still in its movement and afterwards crystalline with light that never shone there as if a god had stepped in that common place shared by mites and cockroaches and ants and a mouse running its stink over the floor as if a child long mute spoke a word and its echo budded into flame in the minds of those who heard suddenly humbled by an unexpected or weight of the lamb on a burnt tongue or the twisted tap in a smoking garden a single wing flapping a lone dog howling a bent nail in the bleak Novembers when the first winds roar from the northern deserts bringing flame to tinder forests and ash falls in the suburbs like soft black stars where frail old women read their fortunes ravens tilt outside shuttered houses summoning a red moon through the blasted twilight humble wooden houses up like a match ash black and grey ash in the black garden and the door swinging on its hinges in a late damp breeze from an ocean far away in the cold south who died? who died? and next door untouched the wind seasonally capricious and the stars unfavourable Venus low and urgent in the west yet fifty metres south honeysuckle dips a curling tongue into cool air in such a November I come to the same questions in another place formed by irreversible losses a landscape of bloated corpses walls crumbled to ruin and no sign of rain