My Brother, My Sister, My Country

CANADA DREAMING*

Half a world away
the morning is warm,
summer reluctant to take its leave.
Berries glisten, ripe and bulging,
birds feast on windfall
bumblebees drone.

It should be spring
bud and blossom
life renewed -
the season feels wrong.

As giant spruce kiss a foreign sky
their languid fingers
limp, suspended,
squirrels forage
busy, like beavers
grey tails turned to the coming cold.

A strident breeze proclaims the storm
red leaves rustle
a swirl of taffeta –
one last dance before the fall.

Rain cascades
a torrent unleashed,
its rhythmic melody covers the earth.
And with the rain
the unexpected -

Eucalyptus
and thoughts of home.

* This poem won the 2004 Poetica Christi Press Poetry Competition.

DIDGERIDOO, OUR MOTHERLAND’S VOICE

on you primeval stream of sound,
figures of light, dancing in light,
their singing familiar as memory;
they people a space of my mind.

yours is the sound of the land’s deep breath,
voicing rocks, plants, places and waters:

a grey-brown sound –
dry ancient mother
your breast feeds all your children –
brushy wombat, and strong soft-furred kangaroo,
rock-hugging grizzle-skinned lizards
lying in the sun like worn-down mountains,
straw-feathered rattle-dry emus,
and the myriad plants that heal and sustain.

my motherland’s voice,
your songs weave the deep secrets of bonding:
and you speak in your old
hollowed-dry tree-voice,
your didgeridoo.

Rebecca Maxwell

COUNTRY TOWN

town by a creek,
creek-flat blurred by the morning mist.
childhood spent in a country town like this?
no Slessor gambols here, just the insistence of time,
with willows whispering back over decades.

centennial park,
brass cadences, and generations of lost words
linger about the rotunda.
Constable tones, with a
jade-like white draught horse by
a stand of camphor laurels.

mid-morning,
the mist draws back to timbered hills.
a valley washed with pastures.
spaces of air and sun.

afternoon heat.
the barber lazes in his chair,
fading Manchester,
sweet smell of leather from the saddlery.

at dusk
each worker shares a shadow with the evening sun.
an ebony pine,
needled, and conclustered
against the darkening sky.
day files into the cool tomb of night.

night.
night is silence,
until cats fight in a spangle of stars.

Peter Stiles