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