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Special N.02 – Poets speak up to Adani

And now the Reef

by Margaret Bradstock and

Flowers turned to stone! Not all the botany
Of Joseph Banks, hung pensive in a porthole,
Could find the Latin for this loveliness…

        – Slessor, ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’

 

 

For them it was unassailable  

an inferno of sea and sharp coral

a Venus fly-trap drawing them in. Fragile

was never the word for this underwater forest

of blooms, at low tide a vertical hedge

of skeletal rock, holding Endeavour to ransom.

 

Off Heron Island, incandescent

chameleon colours once visible from space,

by night the Reef’s a construction site

for marine cities, a limestone world,

the coral polyps always building, never leaving

the safety of their homes except to feed.

 

The reefs outside support both predator

and prey, in an intricate dance of survival.

Cleaner-fish congregate at thriving

cleaning-stations, like a suburban car-wash,

to eat dead skin and parasites

from manta rays already queued for service.

 

Seahorses change colour and texture, matching

the coral they cling to for protection.

Once a year, at full moon, great ribbons

of coral spawn drift on the tide, most

to be eaten by fish. Enough survive. Or would

if you could put the Barrier Reef in a glass box.

 

Bleaching, the crystal tines turn ghostly white

and fade, like flowers dying.

‘And now the Reef’ was previously published in tremble (International Poetry Studies Institute, Canberra, 2016)

Published: August 2022
Margaret Bradstock

has six published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes: poetic responses to ‘settlement’ (2011), Margaret won the national Earth Hour poetry competition in 2014, and the Banjo Paterson Award in both 2014 and 2015.

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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