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Special N.02 – Poets speak up to Adani

from A Concise History of the Moon

by Alex Skovron

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.

‘A Concise History of the Moon’ was previously published in Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014)

Published: August 2022
Alex Skovron

is the author of six poetry collections, a prose novella and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed (2017). His latest volume of poetry, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His next book of poetry, Letters from the Periphery, is in preparation.

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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