Content From Issue: Special 2 - Poets Speak up to Adani
Untitled
who could be eager
with filling the air with disdain
i’m not keen on falling into unfilled holes
when they’ve taken the money and run
i ask can we finally be of our age?
Study for an untitled landscape
What do we do?
We hold back the darkness.
In other words, we fail.
Fail into night
Like perfect angels
Of diminishing light.
At least our battlegrounds,
What you know as sunsets,
Are spectacular.
Fairy Floss
spun to its finest skeins
with all the strands of the past
cohering
around a flimsy balsa stick
this soft numb form
is like life’s airy drift
the flimsiest tangle
of DNA
you, me
the taste of becoming
the idea that sex
is about melting
each other
under no one’s tongue
Black-Throated Finch
By the pool, their fingernail-sized gullets undulate briskly
As if they are guilty celebrities scoffing a midnight treat,
Their black cravats panting with excitement. They can’t
Stay in this kitchen heat for long; fluent in the language
Of dehydration, a fast tipple or else they’re dumbstruck.
Their image burned into extinction’s cyclopean retina,
As if this fragile flock gazed into the sun directly, or they
Were a picnic of ants fried by a bully’s magnifying glass.
The dam water is a current running through their bodies;
It sets off the electricity of their flight, as one they scatter
To the air, like a handful of wedding rice. Their fall might
Weigh as much; in the billionaire’s thoughts he’s ripped
Out the earth’s coal-black throat; the box trees cut open
Like rich sediment. Their habitat halved like a seed cake.
Lake Mungo Series
Hymn to the Commodity-fetish
yeah ok yeah why not
why not yeah for sure
what’s the harm the difference
the problem what seems for sure
you reckon why not for sure yeah
what harm what you reckon what
the megatons the weight the mass the cost
the form the coal the dust the dust
the subsidy the aid the help the indulgence
the tonnes the wait the sedent the watch
the gaze the quiet the place the climate
the story the dust the difference the dust
the shore for sure
the end the cease the stop the passage
the part the past the perish the launch
the waft the fail the drop the fade
the wend the melt the flit the lapse
the sputter the spill the split the quell
the butcher the britten the rid the firk
the send the speed the feeze the sluice
the royn the under the skittle the ice
the quench the shend the time the leese
the lees the swelt the shelf
the wreck the ruin the wretch
for sure the end for sure
the end
from New Energy
Earth Interview in the Anthropocene
An alphabetic language is not mine. It was always mine
Before you spoke, before you wrote it. A language in which you ask me to speak about
Climate, one of my truer tongues. You did not invent it any more than you did
Dinosaurs. You might be thinking that I only react to outside
Events—asteroids, meteorites, humankind, your
Few fallen into prosperity. I act with the
Grace of my law. It is not
Human. I do not resist, nor do I conspire. Multiple
I, I am always the more that you cannot escape. This is
Joy and jeopardy for you, that the things you require, you
Kill. What is it like, you ask me, to be under the Anthropocene
Like you? You have read the Enuma Elish, how even the
Mighty ancient gods had unruly children. I do
Not call you my children. The relationship,
Our relationship, is more complex. Parenthood is a cliché
Proffered to simplify. It is a cliché to say you arrived late after many emergents, lateness a
Quality you took for first place, as if you were last, would last, outlast a
Ration of being. If you ask me, it is like the shiver riding at
Speed. I throw up cyclone and storm, hurricane,
Typhoon, languages for them, drought, fire, each in its place, not
Undoing cycles—they were always infused with chaos—but the
Vigour has changed, is ever-changing, I am changed.
Weather is my stirring cloak (your
X-rated news), my habitat, my atmosphere and
Yes. Yes, you are right to notice the difference, to consider
Zoology, to recall your zooid entanglements, your species of geology.
Adani
requested by Anne Elvey
I’ve written about the Appalachian Fall, when mines
beheaded mountains like limp fowlyard kings, but this
is too neat a betrayal, the wetlands and the coral
becoming a coal pier, the discard dumps, the holes
left behind like Novocaine extractions, the tunnel
that winds inter-related as a rat’s, and drains
the water table, the smooth decapitations, the funnel
giving money to the heartlost and the hopelost: what
could I say that isn’t said, I think? At last,
someone will holiday on carbon credits, perhaps
the company secretary when the coal runs thin,
proud that anthracite funds a hospital. Qld
governments are by definition plump and little,
campaign for those who will campaign for them.
No owner can prove quite traditional: the earth still
owned only when transactional: sold to hunting people
who wear it out, not suffer it like skin.
Hamlet In The Mind Of A Country Schoolteacher
‘Adani killed my father’
These words were in Adam’s head when he woke up, but
he was unable to remember any dream they were part of
It was still daylight: he’d been having a nap
between class and the performance, starting at eight
He walked to the theatre, thinking about the play, went
inside: it was filthy; and a smell of gas from the
leaky radiator
He’d arrived early so he sat up the back, thinking to move
closer when others began to arrive
Hamlet’s problem, he thought, was that the only truths he
had to express were ones that no one, least of all himself
wanted to hear
Last time he’d been here was for a school production of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; he populated the empty stage
with kids crawling over the set, and each other, in green
It emphasised an ecological theme, according to the
program, written by Nadia, the drama teacher: each of the
children’s different roles complemented the others’
Yet to Adam (I am an English teacher after all, he said to
himself in an aside), the children seemed more like an
alphabet than an ecosystem: forming different
letters and words as they moved across the stage, and up
and down different levels of the forest, by vine
He’d lost concentration and forgot about the plot; he was
still vague about it – unlike tonight’s play, which he knew
pretty well, and which would be performed by a touring
professional company of recognisable actors
The blue shadow reminded him of his father (a ghost
rehearsing in the town theatre this bright summer evening?)
No: there was no sign of the cast; could it be gas, and in
any case his father was still alive, and not a miner
but an accountant?
What could he or Hamlet do, to stop the earth spinning to
perdition?
Pear trees grew, tree ferns too, rainforests with child-sized
snakes in them forming S’s and I’s and L’s: be careful in
the quiet
Nadia sat next to him, but was already looking at her
phone, so he didn’t zone in, only relatively, taking in his
surroundings
Yes, he had chosen the worst seat for comfort and view
so he could take that on as a martyr – he’d meant to move
but now he’d have to explain to Nadia; he was sure there
were mice droppings on the floor
He remembered being at the pub the day before, listening
to the pear farmers arguing about the Fortinbras mine, and
the likely effect on them, and their remedy for anger: a
night’s spotlighting
They sounded straight out of Aristotle, or rather like the
version of catharsis argued against by Aristotle’s critics
He spotted one or two of them now, looking and smelling
better than they did at the pub, except the pub was a
posher venue by far
The poster had suggested they were in for a sexy night of
TV stars half-clad and mournful, sponsored by a bank that
must be trying to look good, too
The sponsorship gave Adam a bad feeling, but he thought
that on the whole, he had to side with thinking, and a play
about thinking – however compromising the night
or how it ended (unseasonable weather predicted)
You are the English teacher, after all, as Nadia had said
in the staffroom that afternoon
Recommendations for a Western Australian Coastal Pastoral
1. I am thinking about limits.
A. The gaps between limits. Liminal, littoral spaces.
B.The most fundamental part of ‘human’ consciousness is defined by lack of limits.
C. Unless it is limited by life and death which are themselves littoral rather than literal
2. The beach, we say, is a littoral zone. Do I repeat myself? I repeat myself.
3. In WA the beach is our playground, where our children grow.
A. A playground is a fenced space.
B. Putting a fence around the yard strikes us as being the easiest way of achieving order out of chaos, says Wallace Stevens.1
C. When we grow into our consciousness we find our own limits and no longer need the playground.
D. But Stevens is, of course, talking about America.
4. In the language of early settler Australians, there was no way to describe the landscape. Even the colours were limited.
A. To paraphrase early accounts, yellow, yellow, yellow, desert, death, where is the green?
B. Unsurprisingly, the fields in the WA wheat belt are many shades of yellow, none of them green.
C. The most obviously green thing of WA is the ocean.
D. So it rolls like fields and is most fertile.
E. But there are no sharks in the wheat fields.
5. Flaubert says that thing about being ordered in our dailiness to be violent in our art.
A. He is also not Australian.
6. The US shore lyric is defined by Bloom as one of confronting limits of existence through the impassable borders of the ocean (death)2.
A. WA literature is defined by being in the ocean, out past where your feet can touch the bottom.
7. After the second fatal shark attack at Gracetown, people stopped putting their head under.
8. If oceans are fields, then when you dive under the surface you are in essence burying yourself.
9. At the panel on sharks, the audience was asked who among them had ever had a profound experience in the ocean.
A. Everyone put their hands up.
10. The beach must be protected, said the Premier of WA, it is our way of life. It will be our children’s children’s way of life.
11. On a clear day with your head under water everything looks green.
A. On a less clear day, it’s the more familiar yellow.
12. From space, two things about Australia are visible: the clearing line–a yellow chevron through the wheat belt, and the Barrier Reef–dark green in lighter green.
A. The Reef is slowly lightening.
13. In the 1870s whipping was outlawed in WA, the wheatbelt was cleared and Australia entered the age of enlightenment.
A. A man’s soul might be disciplined separately from his body: rational man can be relied upon to protect his own.
B. Aborigines continued to be whipped, often for not recognising fences.
C. After failure to assimilate they became subject to the Flora and Fauna Act.
D. A man can beat an animal any which way he likes.
14. A country built on genocide is not going to preserve its intact ecosystems says the poet from the wheatbelt.3
15. The colonial Australians we are led to believe suffered from an exile consciousness.
A. The ocean bought us. It is how we try to get back.
16. To catch a shark you bait a drumline and wait.
A. If the shark is three metres: shotto to the head.
B. Drag it past the limits of where the shore.
C. Sink it.
17. Pregnant sharks do not feed for months. A green moss grows in each of their seven rows of teeth.
18. Around our bays we will place shark nets.
19. Fences.
How to Dive in Kelp Forest
kelp (ME cülp(e), of unkn. orig)
—The Concise Oxford Dictionary
The stipes braid together, grow air-filled bulbs, float
each frond towards the surface.
Do not jump into a mess of greenish-gold. Wait for the swing of the boat
to move away. In thick kelp, the surface is not your friend;
sometimes, even the bottom is not your friend.
Make a mental map:
sketch it on your dive slate—plan your depth and time.
Canopies are so thick, it is like cave-diving
—floating through an upper understorey of golden branches. Break stipes
as if you are breaking a pencil—carry shears, but not a big Rambo knife. Don’t start
drowning
and then discover your second stage is unfindable.
Did I mention the sculpins? The senoritas and Spanish shawls? The starfish,
urchins and gorgonians?
Don’t penetrate so deep
you don’t know where out is. When surfacing, select a sand-patch
where blue sky may be seen.
LINES OF GALILEE
There’s a line of creation
from the land
to the Wagan-Jagalingou
from unpolluted seas
to the living Reef we knew.
There’s a line of production
from government bribes the people paid
to coal
to railways and jobs, that’s what they ‘re saying,
and votes.
There’s a line of destruction
from the mountainous rift
and promises politicians
and profit-takers cannot keep,
to the sludge of ports
smearing the ancient waters
shutting down the lives of the Reef.
The next line of finance
will not come from tourists
fronting a reef of bones
and inland the black hole
torn in land the people own.
Yes, dollars and votes cheer
coal’s three-century
industrial fantasy –
polluted air
and scarred earth’s misery.
But see: sun, water, wind,
and thermal flows,
earth’s ancient energies
rouse in the new century
to our aid, to redeem our heritage –
only
devotees of votes and money
we will not hear
what the imperilled earth has said.
Constancy
my compliance cannot be bought
I can rest out of sight but not in focus
visible from space
the glass bottom boat has a stable relationship with the moving view
maybe my depression means my mother bored me even when dying
like my dog yawning when she cannot incorporate what is enacted before her
the largest living thing
I dream my mother smaller than when alive as I hold her
my lack of commitment resistance to presence
I am not in pain I am in disguise
I had to check the baby was still alive
he uses language like you bought it on yourself
then says it is not mass bleaching
somewhere under the stone of anxiety to please is the
the beauty of the closed door
the silver teapot covered in algae
he asks me to make him tea
the more I clean the more it needs cleaning
I use a small bristled brush to clean the spout
it is full of cockroaches
they scatter as I flick them away as more take their place
Building a Happy Nation
A found poem sourced from Adani Australia’s website
Adani strives to exceed the expectations of our stakeholders
We utilise global agribusiness capabilities to cultivate ties
Our vision is to be the largest player in the logistics and energy business
Our strategy is to work the resources of traditional land
We plan to partner with the Juru, Jangga, Birriah, Wangan and Jagalingou people
We’re proud to be opening the Galilee Basin for coal
Our Carmichael mine will discharge up to 60Mtpa at full production
Our open-access infrastructure growth engine will generate rail
We understand our environmental performance is critical to the future of Australia
We hope our potential to unlock India’s trade doors helps
It makes sense —
Adani is perfectly placed to leverage public funding from your government
And via innovative value creation
To execute harm
ADANI Be Gone. ADANI Move on!
Sure its old, years old- about 20 million,
but it’s not as cold as we would wish
or as its creatures need, but still it’s home
to 1500 species of fish
its where dugongs and whales and dolphins roam
and yes, it’s huge, this pulsating place
clearly visible from outer space.
Don’t touch the reef where these creatures live,
It’s not yours to have, not ours to give.
So get back, right back, right now, we won’t allow
you to wreck what is here. No way, no how.
You reckon you won’t crack but you hate the flak.
You want us to refrain from stopping your gain
which is not going to happen ‘cause reaction
is gaining traction. As you ramp up the benefits
listen to the clapping and the rapping of the population
determined to stop this devastation.
As you use your weapon to promise and threaten,
see the Aussies moving in on the politicians.
By your own admissions their likelihood of re-election
is lessening by the insurrection of Mums and Dads
and a squillion people who have had enough.
Fearing for grandchildren whose lives will be rougher
as banks and governments make it tougher
to get a house or pay for basic stuff.
So what’s your beef?
You want to rip out the coal so you get richer.
You’re not worried about climate change
or losing the reef.
You don’t care about dumping all your waste,
you’re happy to let the ground water drain
and leave a chain of voids and a land defaced.
You mightn’t care what happens at Galilee.
Well I’ve got a beef that matters to me.
We want this place to always be. Get away
from our land, our reef, get away from greed.
This living, giving plot is not yours or mine
to have or debase. Find another spot to squat
The world is already too hot, so stop the rot
and get off our kids’ plot. Find another place
where parents don’t care
about the quality of soil and water and air.
And if you can’t, then maybe rethink
your plan, and start to see
the value in protecting eco-diversity.
As a nation then, we can hasten
to protect the uniqueness of the Galilee Basin.
Apart from anything else, we’re not as stupid
as you might need to feed your greed.
We won’t be lending money from the public purse.
We won’t be creating our own country’s curse.
Don’t expect us to fund our destruction.
You might be depending on political corruption,
but the people are not as foolish as you might think.
We’re taking this campaign to the brink.
Adani take a giant leap cause we’re going to keep
these sacred places for our kids to reap
joy in connection with this land they inherit.
Investors might measure wealth in credit and debit
but our country’s value is held in health and harmony.
We work against adversity by treasuring our diversity
and recognising finite resources for what they are.
So Adani take a hint from the Fulani and just move on.
Move on Adani. Be gone Adani. The people have spoken
They won’t be broken. Adani move on. Adani be gone.
tarred cracks
small seeded shapes of weeping windmill grasses
peel back their curling bodies along black tar streams
— kicking up the passage of summer white —
Wild grasses dig in. On the verge
— ululating the roaded way,
on the tar black margins.
One seed escapes; airborne / stillborn /
another slips between flash-wheels
still another, blown by cacophony
settles. Cracked …
wordless
this wind-waved-word — this
mar this split/unspelt
clodded soil —
wildwind’s gentle seeds — stray —
fused between
tarred cracks
Royalty
for millad Miller & Raggett mob
I drove out bush with family
again to Jayipa
a catfish hole lined
with paperbark and river gum
and those gleaming quartzite outcrops
like a silver and zinc plinth encompassing
dark sheet water:
we hopped, stinging, across the baked
earth, a tessellated black
soil with small sand drifts gathering
to the decaying stone-boiled edges:
and while nana fired
a billy, weaving
pandunus frond sieves
we all crashed, energised
in the brown water’s warm wash:
in the late afternoon
cool relief as pop arrived to dig
a bush-turkey ground-oven
we all set to work:
the boys
took a castnet and handlines
for barra
while the girls hunted
in water, feeling
in the mud
for waterlily bulbs, onions and yams:
later they tap-danced the mud
sweetening our outlook –
a seismic detection service reading
for hibernating turtles –
a shelled familial finery:
at nightfall
our guts tight
with their fill we fired
the billy and traced
stars as pop smoked us
in quandong, picking us up:
and nana sang country, rousing
the scrub
and a rainbow’s payback on this mine’s seepage,
and another’s foreshadowed hole in our burial grounds,
mucking us up
making us sick.
focal geology (2)
instructions for engaging with a site:
which makes what sense on a pizza night’s
dark prowl of cars slewed and stopped
by an escaped deer’s graceful trot, tangle
of headlights, tango of engines, deer, hot
fuel, fuelled blood, strange antlers
how they are calm: picture disdain
high-held against the hungry monies
moaning in the pockets
sweep of the wild eye (panic could be building)
the abated klaxons, something being paid for
how will you tell of this later? the cold night
trapped in a swirl vapour, breath,
exhausts, animal, drivers, cars, each
an introduced and the low mountain
years before cut through to make this crash
perhaps you will speak of tariffs
as the boundaries we pay
for having crossed does only
the tilted mind write rush poetry?
as if whatever lives must utter itself swiftly
from where it stands on thixotropic clay
everywhere feet dying in mud
everywhere hands
in help or pushing them under,
the accident eyes, the shine of smashed glass
which inform us we are here, in heightened
air, our nebulae faces blue and orbital
in a condition of being planetary
the particular makers of an atmosphere