Skip to content
Back to issue
From: Vol.06 N.01 – The Everywhere of Things

Big Rain

by Catherine Trundle

After land descends, becomes

a soft larval skin, borne down beneath

this new sea        all things with

 

sap and blood break inward

and thunder rides the cattle fields

 

as you,

stopped on the step, mothy grin, float

pistachio shell canoes across the lawn

predicting how    soon

a scudding light will return. To the

outside

 

As stones go swimming and grow alfalfa tips,

we’ll learn to live here

a second time

 

Words sink in a flood, I said. Words

find their teeth when they worm

through mud, promising things

 

                                            Kith

 

used to mean knowledge, and later

one’s native lands. Now, our likeness

roams as silt through aquifers,

breaths back from culvert cracks

across the fern gully

 

Our children are busy

sowing brassicas along the coal seams.

Unseated, in abeyance, this land

is a limber coin.

Still prone

 

Still pleasant for

the pigeon who visits us at noon

Her arcs are careless but she coos

Over time, this sound will soften up

the hunting grounds

and birth flax

Published: January 2019
Catherine Trundle

is a writer, mother, anthropologist and academic, based in Wellington, New Zealand. She writes flash fiction, poetry and experimental ethnography. Recent work has appeared in Not Very Quiet and Flash Frontier. She is the co-editor of Commoning Ethnography, a journal that seeks to trouble the boundaries between academic thought and creative expression.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED