Poem for the Day

The Last Tree Standing

Earthbound, the last tree stands.
You look up, a fleeting shadow crosses your path.
This tree is one of life's tragedies, quietly
tempering itself to be alone. What else can it do,
but drip leaves, wait for shattering rain,
watch its forebears roll past? A rumbling sound
disturbing root and twig. Double lorries
trussed with logs, a girth as wide as a stone
Hercules might roll. Relocation, destruction.
The space will bear out: untidy hills, poor drainage, salt.
'They don't tell us everything,' a contractor says,
painting a house in the street. A new house
spacious, alum roof, cream brick, concrete.
What have we become "cutting timber",
to mound wood chips, to hone tabletops
for the rich to panic birds?
Still, the one tree stands, mocks us with its
artistry, noble shade; its boiled sap
hearing the woodcutter's saw. Thinking
of an old land of wallaby, bilby, bandicoot,
a cooler time with every bird singing.

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Poem for the Day

The Paradox of Green

On the Destruction of Old Growth Trees, Dwellingup

When the day is twice as hot as the last day of winter, when a visit
to the country opens its secrets, 'doubt' like a downward curve touches
your shoulder. Suddenly you realise they're still raping the land.
Trucks criss-crossing the forest you used to know.
They bend to the task of filling up trays;
lorries hauling away a history of shade. And in the forests:
empty pathways, divided lots of tearaway soil,
bulldozer and saw ragging edges of old Jarrahs -
old growth without sanctuary, without song.
Seeing through it all, seeing the waft of endless
butterflies, you know the birds have fled.
Near the Murray, there's nothing so forlorn
as the empty soundless call of wind
through pines. Small pines, neat pines, no nothing
conifers that hold no wallaby nor owl.
You wonder if that one tree by the roadside,
graceful in its largesse of leaves,
still shares a sentiment with these foreign -
re-assignments filling up the hills.
On the road, the camera is the only thing that
regards this scene. And as you enter picnic
grounds, a gatekeeper informs you the road is rough
at the 2 mile-peg, and mutely anticipates
you will enjoy what is left
of a valley green.

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Robert Adamson

The Hawkesbury River


One of my favourite rivers is the Hawkesbury.
This pic was taken from the punt that crosses over the river at Wiseman's Ferry.

 

Robert Adamson
Australia - International Poetry Web

A Visitation

All night, wild fire burned in the tree tops
on the other side of the river. Now it's morning.
Smoking embers from the angophoras
are landing on the near shore
as a yellow-footed rock wallaby limps, dazed,
from the scrub, its fur matted.
Its tail barely able to support its weight.
Although wounded, it seems miraculous:
the soft yellow of its feet, the hard, sharp black
of its claws. It's the first yellow footer
I've seen for more than forty years...

Extracted from The Golden Bird - Robert Adamson, published by Black Inc.

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From a Feminist Perspective

This cartoon is totally irreverent, but nevertheless from a feminist perspective (& not just the woman in the pic), it's such a hilarious, subversive juxtaposition re "woman as sexual object".

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Poem for the Day

South-West Woods
                                    Tea Tree Cottage, Dwellingup

i
This year, like an inkling for shade
we head to Dwellingup: its wrinkled forest of leaves,
tree walks, birds writing songs of reminisce.
You have memories of the south, the holiday un/packing,
radio songs and kids in the back seat; camping
on the Blackwood river, loaded up with a promised
movement of bathers, scoop nets, rubber dinghy.
To this day, you do not know how 'holiday' - ever,
became a change of pace, a dialectics
of investment, rural containment,
erratic dreamlife, upheaval.

ii
Now these ghosts are long gone and this cottage,
as gift, coaxes us to its tenure of rest,
its pink myrtle, lilac borders,
timber verandah with an open sky
slithering down its starlight.

iii
Relaxed & seeking the flurry of bird & bush,
we trek the green valley dizzy with splendour.
We catch the season, evergreen: kangaroo paw
spider orchids, morning iris. Butterflies
twisting fugues of light; the Murray river rising
each time to meet rope and swimmer. We take in
the beauty of grass and ridge, a little summer heat
- wanting to be singed by this aroma of wilderness;
as if in its namesake Tea Tree Cottage
will promise us composure,
an early morning rise of watercolours,
of summer, a forest rolling past.
Six days of cabin life - we deserve it!
No high-tech, technivision, telephone.
Only a quintessential archway of cool air
infiltrating.

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