from the First Movement, Inferno, of Franz Liszt’s ‘A Symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy’
Destruction is bigotry.
Abandon all hope and you here entering
here entering hope the gate the heat the light
abandoned pit of generations of generating
the constructivist hope the thermal incite
to agony and pain strung out over last days
of ornamental snakes and the brisk flight
of black-throated finches, the gurgle of ways
of hope and divinity and a name like Galilee
and Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ land says
what rights of hope what draughts will flee
the hollows down to the sea and reef made hopeless
in its wreckage and ash rising in clots of adjectives to the glee
of executives fighting for the impoverished — a caress
of largesse of hope of entering the homes of the poor
to make an epic for the world that will stress
rivers and bush and forests and coral reefs and the store
of past that is underneath that foots the bill of now
are merely symbols in an advertising draw-
card for gates and ye and the shrinking self for
all our global aspirations all our dynamic equivalence
our souls our atman our states of being a store
of carbon life-forms bonded over the pits
of cultural extraction of data over the gate
of wealth — great wealth — at the expense
of love as deep as seams as seems to grate
on the nerves of the lost who think they’ve found
their way to higher states to patronise the poor to freight
ethics on a conveyor belt to furnace to abandon
to build a case against the protectors of life of biosphere
and advertise hope of you and us the close the never distant tonnes
of profits all to the greater good the greater glory no fear
of insulting the very earth they walk on, rolling it resoundingly
beneath their feet abandon you abandon ye abandon clear
and present danger as hook to ward off protest so agonisingly
frustrating to the mission to make the gate to go back & forth
through gate to break the gate fast track desert belt accordingly
brigalow belt in grassland denial to report back ‘patchy’ — a dearth
of Acacia harpophylla in the target in the crucible (‘the polygon’)
such survey exonerations of Buffel grass or beneath the coolabah a mirth
a kind of light-hearted get-together a mug of tea on the station
a back-to-work a seize-the-moment and a wonder at the lack of ‘things
created’ as a reconcilable future. Come, don’t hang back, fashion
your own path to the river to cross the Acheron to wash away what clings —
Eucalyptus brownii cheap by the dozen abandon this rough-barked life & canopy
& memories of ye coal fires choking us cancerous hope we could see what sings
when such ancientness is dug up and entered burnt with impunity.