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.

 

 

[6] Carbon

 

from Autobiochemistry

 

Carbon’s multivalence, its

chemical conviviality

 

links it into chains and rings,

improbable larger structures.

 

It’s the skeleton of DNA,

of the hormones that make us

 

female, male; the sugars

that sweeten a mother’s milk;

 

the alcohol good fortune’s

toasted with. It cycles constantly

 

between the living

and non-living.

 

When my body stops, its carbon

will be freed as carbon dioxide

 

by fire or decay

and a tree may breathe me.

 

 

 

The waiting earth

 

I don’t know the physics of how an aeroplane

stays up. Something to do with air pressure

above and below the wing.

It seems unlikely.

 

More than one psychic’s predicted my happy old age

on the strength of a groove

that links heart-line to ring finger. Perhaps we owe

our continued altitude

 

to that mark on my palm. Fellow-travellers

riffle through magazines, watch the movie.

I’m glued to the window, freed from fear

by awe. Impossible

 

not to love the world seen from here.

As the plane turns to land, I hang in space

over a tilted wing, absorbing forested curves,

a river’s sinuous silver.

 

If we held this course, spiralling down

to the waiting earth, this beauty would be here

till the moment we ploughed into it

and after.

 

 

 

Taken from space, photos of earth

open-cut for coal

are like the ultra-sound stills

of a cross-section of face

where melanomas had metastasised

necessitating removal

of parts of the cheekbone and jaw.

Sustained inhalation of coal dust

is the mineral equivalent of breathing in

tubercular saliva, and where

the water table is black, the black-

throated finch will go out like a spark

struck from the gold nib of a pen

that signs a deal changing Native Title.

The word scrub as clear-fell.

Aquifer as under-the-table profiteer.

A dugong will surface trailing sea grass

like magnetic tape in a port

where piers were hammered home

to support the loading of containers.

And as for the Great Barrier Reef

whatever the run-off from fertiliser leaves

untouched will be imperilled

by the passage of ships

with a history of oil and coal spills.

A drone sends back HD footage of a pod

of humpback whales off Abbot Point.

An executive nods

and stamps the scene with approval

his hand waving like the flipper

of an overturned Flatback turtle.

Today, 30 October 2017, from 8.00am to 8.00pm (EasternDaylight Saving Time Australia) Plumwood Mountain journal is posting poems as text, audio or video by poets Speaking up to Adani in relation to the proposed mining of billions of tonnes of coal, climate change, and the impact on the Great Barrier Reef. While we do not claim to speak for the traditional owners, we acknowledge and support the Wangan and Jagalingou People fighting to defend their lands from Adani and Government. Watch this video about their campaign:

 

 

Judith Wright (1915-2000), well-known Australian poet, was a long time activist for both Aboriginal Land Rights and environment, and with a group of poets, artists and ecologists was instrumental in the campaign to protect the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. In 1996, in a second foreword to her 1977 book The Coral Battleground (republished in 2014 by Spinifex Press), she wrote:

To me, it’s a kind of miracle that things have gone so well for the Great Barrier Reef. But I know that its survival is owing to a great deal more than luck and circumstance. Luck there has been – no big tanker has crashed in its passages, no plot by destructive forces has succeeded in breaking down its legislative and managerial defences, it has been very fortunate in the official appointments and scientific tasks that support it. If disasters in the shape of weather, accident and climate change lie ahead, the work done already has shown what can be done to shield it from such dangers and has proved that people will agree, in the event, to supplying the help it needs (The Coral Battleground, Spinifex, 2014, xxii).

 

Sadly, we know now that the reef’s ‘luck’ may not be holding – with bleaching events likely exacerbated by climate change, the proposed rail link and development of the coal port at Abbot Point, the export and burning of coal intensifying climate change, and governments prepared to ignore voices, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, speaking up for land and sea against corporate interests, epitomised by Adani. Poets, in the spirit of Judith Wright and Val Plumwood, are joining a groundswell of resistance that the Wangan and Jagalingou Defence of Country and the related Stop Adani campaigns represent. View this video from the Stop Adani campaign:

 

 

The New York Times posted this editorial opinion less than a week ago, saying that the Carmichael mine is ‘the last thing Australia and our planet need’.

The ABC Four Corners program ‘Digging into Adani’ aired on Monday 2 October 2017 can be accessed here.

Read ‘Adani and the Galilee Basin’ by Susan Reid in Australian Book Review here.

Plumwood argued that environmental action and the development of an environmental culture go hand in hand. In her later writings in particular, she saw the creative arts, of which poetry is one, as significant for the development of an environmental culture. She wrote:

creative writing can also play an important part by making visible new possibilities for radically open and non-reductive ways to experience the world (‘Journey to the Heart of Stone’, in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, ed. F. Beckett and T. Gifford, Rodopi, 2007, 17).

Plumwood Mountain Journal takes its name from the mountain near Braidwood, Plumwood Mountain, whose name itself Val Plumwood adopted for her own.

Follow along as we post poetry today, some protest, some dystopia, some speaking simply to a worldview different from a corporate mining one.

Robert Adamson	Judith Beveridge	Margaret Bradstock	Kevin Brophy
Michelle Cahill	Anne M Carson	Bonny Cassidy	Jennifer Compton
Stuart Cooke	Dan Disney	Tricia Dearborn	B R Dionysius
Jonathan Dunk	Anne Elvey	Michael Farrell	Susan Fealy
Claire Gaskin	E A Gleeson	Phillip Hall	Kristin Hannaford
Susan Hawthorne	Siobhan Hodge	Jill Jones	John Hawke
John Kinsella	Kit Kelen	Anthony Lawrence	Rose Lucas
Jennifer Mackenzie	Jennifer Maiden	Caitlin Maling	Garth Madsen
Judith Rodriguez	Michele Seminara	Alex Skovron	Pete Spence
Linda Stevenson	Anne Buchanan- Stuart	Patricia Sykes	Caroline Williamson
Richard James Allen	Michael Aiken	Jennifer Harrison

 

 

~ after Pierre Reverdy

 

The suffering has ended. Empty your eyes, a new era begins. Heads, once out of line, have fallen. People call from windows. Surrounded by laughter becoming noise, others call up to the windows. Animals never seen before come out form the alleys. There are broad-faced women with broad accents walking pavements, talking freely, their faces lit up, their hair undone. Sunlight, trumpets, and pianos are playing boogie. Emboldened, people smile in public places. The intact houses blink, doors swing open and somehow smile back to other houses. The banal parade floats above the ash of iron filings. A mother with a blue apron that frames her baby cheers at random, another child by her side trembles, astonished and fearful. There’s an apparition of an angel, timid and adrift in the midst of life, while rustling people gather in the square. Foreigners pass by in a group, singing under bright umbrellas, their lyrics sleek and empty. A grandfather goes about extinguishing street lamps against the coming radiance. A jazz dancer leaps out from her suitcase with an answer nobody can understand. A policeman rides his one-wheeled bike, his thighs swollen against black leggings. He circles the stragglers, until a spotlight picks up his problem. The circus of shadows moves through the jumping city as rackets break their own strings. On the far ramparts, a boy with a thousand dreams cries because he feels he is ugly.