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?

 

 

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.

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

 

 

 

Coral polyps, like ashen fingers raised

in passing of a season gone too soon,

whiten as our politicians betray

 

both the Wangan and Jagalingou’s ways –

a gesture of ecological doom.

Coral polyps, their ashen fingers raised

 

trace the fine print of legislative phrase

revealing truths that we mustn’t impugn,

whiten as the politicians betray

 

our children’s future and reef as it weighs

heavy on the tide of rhetoric strewn.

Coral polyps with ashen fingers raised

 

conduct the coda of coal’s song of praise,

notes drift like silt over cities immune

that blacken as our politics betray.

 

In the North, as the island palm trees sway,

divers map bleached reef like marble hewn –

coral polyps, like ashen fingers raised,

whiten as our politicians betray.

 

Adani Coal Mine Approved

 

Great Barrier

 

she dreams of making armour for the earth

a helmet to prevent the drillers from beginning

a breastplate so they cannot cut open her heart

greaves to stop the underground lines

breaking through to the watertable

 

it confounds her that anyone would want

to mine the Basin of Galilee

to make the earth a corpse to strip

back the muscle layer by layer

to let light in under all that rich deep earth

to groom her for profit burn coal embers

in the asthmatic air the heat increasing

to burn away everything for the emptiness

of waterdrained lungdrained flatlands

 

Let them eat coal not food.

for Diana Bridge

 

At the slow-gaited end of summer’s day,

dragonflies dart as precisely as needles

tatting the ornate patterns of lace-charts.

A kingfisher snatches a dragonfly midair—

holds it in its bill like an ampoule

of iridescent magenta ink. Slowly

an egret lifts—smoke from a clutch

of joss sticks. Koi sip at the surface, their lips

like the rubber rings of party balloons.

Another egret rises, legs trailing under

it long and thin as toasting forks.

A damselfly in rapid flight, a scholiast’s pen

annotating in margins, stops, touches

down on a lotus. Then a heron

with the calm posture of a Shinto priest

about to cleanse a shrine with prayer

steps suddenly towards an ibis

swallowing what its caught

from leaf pulp and bottom slime. I hear

the polyphonic tinkling of water, a tizwas

of insects soft-pedalling above white stones.

 

Remember Gujarat? Tidal mangroves were blocked

by bunds & embankments, Chinese MoU,

revenues from aluminium, polysilicon, animal feeds.

 

The Paris Climate, OECD delegates sipped their lattes,

declaiming coal dust, steam choking the fish,

bleached nuggets, burgeoning coral cemeteries.

 

We, with our winning smiles, tweeting environmental

charities, retweeting memes, protests, petitions, trending,

bracketed clauses in the draft agreement, spineless

 

politicians, Tourism Australia. Never mind Sir David

or Obama— we needed Murrawah, Amelia, Xiuhtezcatl

to sing the rewilding of grasslands, reefs, native title—

 

Who knew that Subrata Maity and Claude Alvares

defended the Mundra, or Mormugão Port in Goa from

pollution violations?  The permits were not revoked.

 

When 10 per cent of robots lived in cities compliant

with WHO air quality guidelines, when the black

rhinoceros outnumbered the black-throated finch?

 

Nevertheless we sweltered, with news analysis full

blast, we dialled up air cons, we talked prophylactic

gene editing, from monkey to pig to Homo Saps.

 

We wrote dirges for the third world, prohibiting diesel

& motorcycle distributors, reversing neo-colonialism

with a corporate warrant to exhume the Galilee basin.

 

Everyone was abused; the state’s litigations, economic

futures, First nations, mind & memory’s quaint algorithms,

poems festering, composed in acid rain; volatile

in smog.

 

III  New

 

Every dome we built is overgrown with tendrils,

They say the time to civilize our satellite

Is coming soon;

Architects and doctors, planners with their pencils

Design and theorize and calibrate

For living-room.

Thinking stops the blood, a mounting terror festers,

The leaving of a land is no small sacrifice

Even for us;

Seldom in the drunkest dreams of our ancestors

Could such an odyssey have been devised

We dare at last.

Trapped between the smell of history and stasis,

We plot a future where forgetfulness will cross

The crescent Earth;

Children we encounter (ours or something else’s)

Will seek in vain within their glossaries

The word for birth.

from Cap Coch

 

1

 

What a miner knows is in the air around him.

Its movement. Its fresh or stale. And in the rock

which creaks and settles overhead, which cracks

 

and falls from the coal face at the miner’s feet.

Where water runs, or not. Sounds, smells.

The flare of a lantern. Methane, invisible,

 

leaking from who knows where. Water that’s flooded

another working, dammed for decades, pressing

behind the coal face. You need to be able to read

 

the interruptions underground. An ancient

river bed where the accumulated

peat once washed out to sea. A fault in the rock

 

from a prehistoric earthquake. Always beyond

the barren rock the coal keeps going. One

old man will tell a grandchild about the darkness,

 

when he was twelve years old: your lamp goes out

and you can’t see your own hand. And how when you cut

under the coal face it comes away clean, sometimes,

 

smooth as a mirror, and on that shiny surface

a fern, each frond clear as the day it fell,

gleams in the light of your lamp, almost like new.

 

2

 

Where’s everybody gone? On the stony track

with unpredictable breezes swirling around

the minibus, we perch in our badly fitting

 

bright yellow safety helmets high

above the black chasm of the mine.

Impossible depth, impossible distances,

 

not a human being in sight. On the far side,

kilometres away, clanking and clumsy

as some ancient monster struggling onto land,

 

one big machine prods at the side of the pit.

Coal dust hovers around it. If that gets close,

the guide tells us, we’re out of here. You wouldn’t

 

want that in your face. Fields run to the edge

of the open cut: a miniature tree clings on

to its final months of life. There’s just one bloke

 

sitting in the cab down there in air-conditioned

comfort. Pretty much soundproof. That thing cuts

more coal in a day than a thousand men. The breeze

 

picks up. The cloud of coal dust eddies, rises,

begins to move towards us. Helmets off,

we scramble for seats. The bus grinds into gear.

 

 

DIG

 

In the pan your gravels crashing hatched their prize—

a brindle rush to hump my veins and fever up the leaf

that twisted in our fields. The guilt was white, my soul a sieve.

It boomed with bull to see the dust an avenue of spin—

and my brickhouse hazy as a reef, its aura built to scale.

I seemed to tap its skin.

Birth was the pits but this is mine. Rabbits swimming to shake my mitts.

 

 

 

Nightwork

  

A conveyor belt reaping into action, cries

 

rubbish rocks rubbish rocks

 

breaks up floodlight, its flesh

a stingray covered, uncovered.

 

Pandanus leans

magic, enters the bulldozer

rearing

its tyres dissolve

 

as from the rocks and rubbish

the camera conveys

 

one kid

naked and furiously sweeping

a path through reeds, pandanus

shaken

entranced

 

by the trucks and manganese

at her feet.

 

The old men spin like tyres covered, uncovered.

 

It’s the sixties, then it isn’t.

Let’s blame it on the times:

scattering before headlights

 

from mining trucks. Swaying tracks

arrest both lanes, dinosaur pads

 

wait for them to pass

before we can move on,

 

but the road is getting lean.

 

Buy a pen and I’ll draw

where money is born:

 

hole in the ground, catheter

seep from sepsis, drips through every

 

layer. We stand on filter paper:

nothing gets through

 

that won’t be discarded.

 

Chapters thicken like burns

and we carry stanzas home

 

with 5pm fidelity. Budget

for bliss. We’ll laugh all the way

 

to something.

 

There isn’t enough to strain

this season of sameness,

 

grilled up north out of sight,

but we’re filtering the bigger picture

 

through stones and stubs and strikes.

You’re out. There is life here, and it is wrapped

 

in plastic. A miracle of hauntings

 

and we have forgotten nothing.

The lines still run underground

 

and in rivers raw with split fish.

Taxation is no limit, poetry has no queue.

 

Dug up and dried out, we know

the solemnity of being bought,

 

but celebrate being paid for.

 

Lightning signs

with a simple cross,

with the swiftness of grasslands

swindled for quarry,

 

for a beach of burning river sand

hatched by ophidian shadows,

a glanced lizard scudding

on the prismatic surface of water tension,

 

for the clean face of a wave

thickening with blackness of dolphins.

 

Wet money gurgles in a swamp

and the oligarch’s easement is guaranteed,

a hireling paid

to scrape and oil his armoury.

 

Fields of white stubble await the razor’s

grin, the ingress of blighted spirits,

a charring smoulder that reveals

dripping stalagmites of morgue,

 

dirt bikes yawing on the switchback

precipice past Turnaround Road,

all the young dudes on Maybe Street

Bombala,

taloned logging trucks.

In the underwater tunnel of the civic aquarium

the octopus leaned his wretched head

 

against the glass of his turbid pool

sucking on his breathing tube, like

 

a severed vein

so he could live.

 

He asked for his ocean. He asked me,

the daughter of the powerful race.

 

I was standing alone like a child stands

with her entry ticket in her hand.

 

No!   No boom-town   no brown current

no smoky vessel   no swollen cooked mud

no slop shock   no money juggle

no ghost bloom   no blunt petrol hull

no smudge rock   no possess.

Yes!   Keep the lode under.

 

Hope for old flows to grow

polyp  sponge  weed

rock  mollusc

worm  turtle  dugong.

 

Conserve, do not stress.

Love the blue levels

the upwell   the fluent spheres under

guyot  gull sweep  storm hover

sky green fluxes  fresh flume.

Defend exoskeletons, broken hydro-forest.

Stop runoff  overuse.

Don’t cut holes under clouds.

 

You new crown-of-thorns, go!

No short-term clever

no smoke-burn genus murder.

Begone!

 

Keep us hold whole.

Let enfold of

north to south

whole blue current

whole source flush blood

mother cells.

 

Hope for whole country

not those who would strop

or cull reef.

Keep touch the swell deep course.

 

Loss is days

passing,

the traction of years deflating

the vertical

so that a man, once a pearl in a dark mouth,

becomes sound’s flat plane.

The beating heart is corrosion,

scattering leaves,

butterflies, leaves.

Each mumbling moment.

Each frozen, irretrievable One.

Headlines could be the only things that matter;

the rest is just flesh, flow,

proliferation.

This sense that everything’s

the same and what I see – in the way

a tree emerges or an emu speeds – are the tips

of the freezing.

How to keep pace with the sun?

Never to falter. To be a cat curled

in the corner of a doorway, smiling dreamily.

Can the dream of shade

moving further out across the grass

ever be reconciled

with this tightening stiff of the gut?

On that note, how to follow a poet’s letters

to the memories of childhood

while fixated

upon the streaked darkness, through which

I perpetually, always

without seeing, fall?

 

 

 

someone is digging a hole in me

biggest ever this time! wow!

I’m paying a billion dollars for this

(lazy billion, don’t you know)

 

the hole they’re digging in me makes fumes

smells bad, it leaves an ugly mess

kills everything all around

 

oh well – that’s me for self-esteem

I’m paying a million bucks

it’s like I’m trying to make friends

 

you’d think there was something killing me

and doctors had to cut it out

but it’s not like that at all

 

the hole they’re digging is a threat to life

people will die like flies from the smoke

we know because they’re dying already

from all the other holes in me

and in everyone else

 

you’d think it was a money spinner

but I’m paying to get it done

 

it’s true they’ve dug big ones in me before

but this one is the biggest yet

in fact it’s the biggest hole in the world

 

why is it they’re digging this hole?

why do I pay them to?

people ask what’s wrong with me

 

the hole’s to make a fire

fire’s holy

it’s for a church of smoke

I believe!

I’m doing it all for old King Adani

the peasant king

great man

 

they’re digging the biggest hole in the world

I pay them to dig it in me

 

the sun must have burnt a hole in my head

this hole will be burning my pocket soon

I have to be insane

 

so many of me

backs into it

the wheel must roll on!

 

the hole must be dug

the biggest in the world!

 

this way I’ll burn till we’re all a lot warmer

 

they’re digging for what’s deep down in me

what’s that?

a billion dollars digging

my money

I’m paying for this to be done

it’s a loan

but I don’t think I’ll see the money come back

none of the banks thinks so

none of the banks will lend to the king

 

but look at the ships queuing up for the port

they’re taking me away to burn

my fire will light up half the world

you won’t see through the smoke

 

don’t you point the finger at me

I’m not doing it

it’s my job

I pay for it to be done

I’m mad?

 

and the sea is dark with it

nothing lives there

and the sky is smoke

my lungs and yours

 

we’re all going to burn so bright

no one will see through the haze

a billion dollars worth of burning

it’s nothing

it’s the cheapest solution

 

you don’t want to pay more

do you?

 

not for a great big hole

the biggest!

 

I can’t help saying it again

the biggest!

the biggest hole ever!

they’re digging it in me

I’m so proud

 

you’d think there was something

we had to bury

 

more fire!

more smoke!

more damage than ever before!

 

it’s because it’s so big

we just have to do it

if you want an omelette, breaks eggs

 

don’t argue

or you can stay out of the kitchen

let’s see just how high this sea can go

we’re making more ocean views?

everyone’s a winner

there’ll be more for everyone to swim

 

it’s the fossils who are doing the digging

we have to pay for it too

 

because, if they don’t dig this hole in me

they’ll dig in someone else

and that, my friends, would be very bad indeed

they’ll dig there anyway, they will

they might as well dig a hole in me

 

they say he’s a gangster

the big man with moustache

we’re giving the money

oh sage old king

just look at him

and see how wise

 

you’d be a fool not to have the hole dug

he’s offering to handle it all

only a billion!

we dig

that’s all we have to do

 

just give him the money

then we can dig the hole in me

 

they say that he’s done it before

but that can’t be true

this is one of a kind

 

the hole they’re digging in me

it’s the biggest one ever

lazy billion’s worth, I said

 

overseas, the poor, they deserve this great pit –

the dirty great hole they’re digging me

 

with this, they can choke to death in good light

such is the hole that they’re digging in me

they’re going to dig

you can’t stop them

 

how can you stand in the way of a king?

 

and the sea is coal

and the sky is coal

and your heart’s as dark as mine

 

you couldn’t vote for this sort of thing

I must really hate myself

to let them dig this hole like this

 

but isn’t it the gangster’s right –

to come to the end of the world

and be given my lazy billion to dig

to dig a hole in me?

 

we mustn’t say no to the future

there’s so much sun in Queensland

they’re digging a hole in me

 

I think that it’s time

to stand up and say

 

do you think

we’ll wake up in time?

 

 

 

Read the pdf here.

 

 

from the First Movement, Inferno, of Franz Liszt’s ‘A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy’

 

            Destruction is bigotry.

 

 

Abandon all hope and you here entering

here entering hope the gate the heat the light

abandoned pit of generations of generating

 

the constructivist hope the thermal incite

to agony and pain strung out over last days

of ornamental snakes and the brisk flight

 

of black-throated finches, the gurgle of ways

of hope and divinity and a name like Galilee

and Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ land says

 

what rights of hope what draughts will flee

the hollows down to the sea and reef made hopeless

in its wreckage and ash rising in clots of adjectives to the glee

 

of executives fighting for the impoverished — a caress

of largesse of hope of entering the homes of the poor

to make an epic for the world that will stress

 

rivers and bush and forests and coral reefs and the store

of past that is underneath that foots the bill of now

are merely symbols in an advertising draw-

 

card for gates and ye and the shrinking self for

all our global aspirations all our dynamic equivalence

our souls our atman our states of being a store

 

of carbon life-forms bonded over the pits

of cultural extraction of data over the gate

of wealth — great wealth — at the expense

 

of love as deep as seams as seems to grate

on the nerves of the lost who think they’ve found

their way to higher states to patronise the poor to freight

 

ethics on a conveyor belt to furnace to abandon

to build a case against the protectors of life of biosphere

and advertise hope of you and us the close the never distant tonnes

 

of profits all to the greater good the greater glory no fear

of insulting the very earth they walk on, rolling it resoundingly

beneath their feet abandon you abandon ye abandon clear

 

and present danger as hook to ward off protest so agonisingly

frustrating to the mission to make the gate to go back & forth

through gate to break the gate fast track desert belt accordingly

 

brigalow belt in grassland denial to report back ‘patchy’ — a dearth

of Acacia harpophylla in the target in the crucible (‘the polygon’)

such survey exonerations of Buffel grass or beneath the coolabah a mirth

 

a kind of light-hearted get-together a mug of tea on the station

a back-to-work a seize-the-moment and a wonder at the lack of ‘things

created’ as a reconcilable future. Come, don’t hang back, fashion

 

your own path to the river to cross the Acheron to wash away what clings —

Eucalyptus brownii cheap by the dozen abandon this rough-barked life & canopy

& memories of ye coal fires choking us cancerous hope we could see what sings

when such ancientness is dug up and entered burnt with impunity.