It’s Spring
Or gagabalingu on Bundjalung Country -
The goannas awake;
I watched one from the veranda
As it tore up the bark on a hoop pine
Sharpening its claws
Or just showing them off, I was unsure.
Peaflowers bob in pinks and purples,
Whilst gusts and gales from the North
Toss the rainbow bee-eaters
From branches
And ruffle the feathers
Of newly shelled swamphens
Peep peeping their heads out
Into this brave new world
With its
Bare soil and battered river banks.
It’s supposed to be the driest month of the year
But it is raining again.
My clothes remain damp on the line
My gumboots are muddied
And the Bureau of meteorology has whispered that yes,
Yes
It could happen again.
A whisp of blue on the radar
Bulges and swells
From blue to yellow to red
Beware-me red.
The house has no walls,
But a series of rectangular beams
loosely
stacked into rooms.
Metal rods grasp at the roof and the floors, holding tight
This human nest
lest cyclonic winds come rampaging
To feast on weatherboard
And roofing tiles,
At café cataclysm
Stripped bare,
There is space here between the rafters
To let the façade slip
and utter words
of fear and uncertainty.
Timber piled higgeled and piggeled
underhouse
Roughly sawn
From flood-drifted trees.
The morning is
shifting and stacking
of wooden beams
Above the flood level,
Lest it float away again.
Soon they will line the loungeroom
and kitchen
and bedrooms
In delicious irony.
The flood giveth
And the flood taketh away
But mostly the flood taketh away.
With composure and patience
He has stepped through the reality that sits before us,
considered
That suffocating ceiling of cloud,
That rising damp in the soil outside
Those black green blotches
Of mould
That dance over surfaces and burrow deep into the fibres
Of your home, your clothes, your skin.
Today I was told
That someone had their chest cut open
To replace a heart grown ill with mould.
The ripples of the flood
Penetrating to our very core.
As the rain grows fiercer outside
I hope the swamphen chicks are dry.
September 2022