requested by Anne Elvey
I’ve written about the Appalachian Fall, when mines
beheaded mountains like limp fowlyard kings, but this
is too neat a betrayal, the wetlands and the coral
becoming a coal pier, the discard dumps, the holes
left behind like Novocaine extractions, the tunnel
that winds inter-related as a rat’s, and drains
the water table, the smooth decapitations, the funnel
giving money to the heartlost and the hopelost: what
could I say that isn’t said, I think? At last,
someone will holiday on carbon credits, perhaps
the company secretary when the coal runs thin,
proud that anthracite funds a hospital. Qld
governments are by definition plump and little,
campaign for those who will campaign for them.
No owner can prove quite traditional: the earth still
owned only when transactional: sold to hunting people
who wear it out, not suffer it like skin.