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From: Vol.06 N.02 – Intersecting Energies

Mount Elephant

by 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.

Published: July 2019
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.

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.

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