Kathryn Fry
Swainsona formosa
There, above the gibbers and crusty
earth, the rise of red on a wash
of green—red flags, red keels, the dark
lustrous boss in between, ready for birds,
ready to seed for the long odds of summer;
florid David among the arid Goliath.
I’ll grow you here, in the newly parched,
seed you in a bed of dry bark and creek
sand. To course rampant down my brick
walls, to carry the cool stars of a desert
night, the light swamping a red-ochre range,
and the optimism you ride, on a whiff of rain.
Kathryn Fry relocated to the Lake Macquarie area from Canberra a few years ago. She has poems in various anthologies including Australian Love Poems, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Watermark and Once Wild (the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2014). Her poem “Under the Old Tangle” was longlisted for the inaugural Ron Pretty Poetry Prize awarded in 2015.