Poem for Thursday and Great Falls

Blaze 

By Michelle Cahill 

for Nick 

It is hard to imagine how desolate the sea.

Mars on the horizon, a fickle half-moon,

the currawong’s arc rending the day with a shrill song,

a sweet and lonely song.

At least this morning the sun is bandaged,

blistering through the skies, burnt melaleuca,

soap mallee, sugar gum and wattle.

Winter’s dead stalks are springtime veins, shivering

watertight in the wind, which has its way,

all over. So what of our choosing?

To the east and the west of Vivonne Bay

the dunes are a crematorium,

vestiges of a charred isthmus, French bays,

English rivers, pony clubs, slaughterhouses,

rock shelves where seal pups were dragged,

clubbed, skinned and salted. From 1803

bloodlines mingled so the smaller, finer wallaby

knows, instinctively, not to trust despite

vegetable peelings I offer. They watch  

through my kitchen window. I’ve read about

some women who drowned, trying to escape

the stigma of names like ‘Emma’, ‘Puss’ and ‘Polecat,’

the disappearing emu, possums sold for rum,

tobacco, salt, silver, eucalyptus grease,

the tonnes of yacca gum it took to make explosives.

Fire taught me to abandon everything.

When fire comes, shelter on a whalebone,

lay by a river, wither in a shepherd’s grave.

That is history.

To learn I am nothing

to put the darkness back where it belongs,

to wet my tongue with rain,

to swallow the past, as one nourished,

to stay

wherever the wind should scatter.

-------- 

Thursday was gloomy and chilly with rain on and off. We went out at lunchtime to Blazing Bagels to get bagels for lunch for the next few days, but otherwise it was a chore and reading day until mid-afternoon, when we walked to the beach. Then I talked to my Thursday chat group, although only three of us made it this week. We watched the Seahawks-Cowboys game over dinner, which I was enjoying a lot until the fourth quarter, sigh. 

Then we watched the rest of Faraway Downs, which wasn't as different from Australia as I was expecting. There's not as much Indigenous perspective as advertised except some mystical stuff, while it retains all the disjointed Wizard of Oz stuff and blows up its massive white savior narrative even more with the changed ending, which, let's face it, is a downer. Still, it's filmed as beautifully as the light at Great Falls last week: