Mike Ladd

Pretty as a pippin and just as tight –

land of honesty boxes

and shot-holes in the signage.

Woods culture of stiff opinion:

log and lop / love and lock.

Square houses, their squiggles of smoke

tanging the valley.

A road from big to small:

stormclouds hazing the Hartz mountains,

in the tidy glens, a wrenish attention to detail.

All double lines:

massacre of possum and pademelon,

gut stink in the roadside daisies.

The blackberries ripen by the river

which starts out Scots and English,

finishes sweepingly French –

and the Tahuni Lingah, where are their names?

Mike Ladd lives and writes in Adelaide. He ran Poetica on ABC Radio National for two decades and currently makes radio documentaries for RN. His most recent collection of poetry and prose is Invisible Mending, published by Wakefield Press in 2016.