Rose Lucas
Djerrinallum
Late afternoon light spills
gentle
across your swaying flank –
crouched and somnolent on basalt plains –
stroking you into lengthening shadows, still heady
with the perfume of summer grasses;
The bleached yellow smoothness of your cauled hump
drapes
a membrane over what has gone before –
distant explosions,
the earth itself on fire,
the molten surge that tore your lip
[pressure, pressing up]
then pouring down
that wide gold-vermillion road and
out into the cooling night, its
open fields –
Tonight, dust and grass seeds gust and
settle;
sea swallows rise like prayers and
magpies try their notes into the gathering dusk:
Out of sight,
earth turns and groans,
cracks and heaves – and still
we ride her
always too confident
into an opening dark.
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic. Her first collection, Even in the Dark (UWAP 2013) won the Mary Gilmore Award; her second collection, Unexpected Clearing was published 2016 (UWAP). She is currently completing her third collection This Shuttered Eye.