DIG

In the pan your gravels crashing hatched their prize—

a brindle rush to hump my veins and fever up the leaf

that twisted in our fields. The guilt was white, my soul a sieve.

It boomed with bull to see the dust an avenue of spin—

and my brickhouse hazy as a reef, its aura built to scale.

I seemed to tap its skin.

Birth was the pits but this is mine. Rabbits swimming to shake my mitts.

Nightwork

A conveyor belt reaping into action, cries

rubbish rocks rubbish rocks

breaks up floodlight, its flesh

a stingray covered, uncovered.

Pandanus leans

magic, enters the bulldozer

rearing

its tyres dissolve

as from the rocks and rubbish

the camera conveys

one kid

naked and furiously sweeping

a path through reeds, pandanus

shaken

entranced

by the trucks and manganese

at her feet.

The old men spin like tyres covered, uncovered.

It’s the sixties, then it isn’t.

Bonny Cassidy

From Chatelaine (Giramondo, 2017). ‘DIG’ was first published in Blackbox Manifold Issue 14. ‘Nightwork’ was first published in Cordite Poetry Review Issue 44.

Photos in collage from: CSIRO CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons