I’m in a crowd, whipped awake by the weather, wind spreading shards of splintered light, the thin rain billowing. A woman speaks: all i, she says, all i feeding in the air of this place all leaf and wing all bone becoming rock and soil lizard feet wattle seed There’s a murmur. all here, she says, not land we RETURN to HERE is soil HERE are roots veins and ribs storm clouds in our palms HERE sea lions growling frogs we’re not ourselves ourselves reaching out but all i damselfly sturgeon and lemur dunnart and forest spores this yellow bird this biting ant arm suckers flower buds She stands on ground she has jack-hammered from its path. Daylight on the hidden soil. The centre of the city. Peeled. To remind us. Open. To where we are. Rain pouring down. all i, she says all i heart and ocean bed bark in the tendons of our hands sky in our tongues all i The crowd of us. Pieces of each other in the hours we’ve cast wide. In the cloud-river’s fall, how it rips through forests felled, cramming under the city. Frog she explains, koala fish all breathless did we know? In our flesh seed-and-rot and-rippled-air the space she’s exposed rain and-sea-and-river bone-soil mountain-stone (star)dust in our mouths.
From: Vol.08 N.01 – Embodied Belonging: Towards an Ecopoetic Lyric
The always and never returning
by
Kristen Lang