Perth to Darwin

ROCKS WAITING TO PREY BY THE ROADSIDE
Suntanned
Lolling by the roadside
 
Waiting
Chilly winds
Crack their faces
 
Desert suns
Crisp their resolve
Slowly moving
Inexorably toward the tar
Slowly, slowly
 
Times pass
Nigh is near
Speeding bigmouths
Beckon
Jeering as they pass
 
Enough
Resolve kindles
Pushing forward
Slowly, in between
Cracks
 
Smiles emerge
As they prey and feast
Festooning forward
In the black light
Of night
 
BOABS AND
BLACK COCKIES
Sitting expectantly
Waiting for dark wings
To alight
 
Aged by sun and dust
Boabs float
On a sea of sand
 
Dwarfed giants
Bloat
With juices of the Black Gods
 
Hawking coughs
Herald arrivals
Of evening’s cackle
 
Slowly settling
Roosting atop
Proud boughs
 
THE ABATTOIR
Thirty years
Ages a park bench
Paint peels layers of meaning
Revealing
 
Slowly the croc awakes
One eye opens
Thru translucent film
Peering
Memory unclouds
 
Looker and the looked at
Lock eyes and minds
Atop a Boston Bun world
Turned turvey
 
Drought decimates
Sheep and shearers
Unbonding
Each going their separate way
 
Travelling is a hiccup
Jumping from one line
To another
Transhipping
 
Slowly the call for unity
Emerges from drunken crowds
Led by gangs of michs
Freedom, liberty?
 
Have one on me!
 
STROMATOLITES
Billions of spawn
Over billions of years
Microbial reefs
Sustaining life
 
Coned and domed
Biologically sound
Sitting in the sun
Sifting, sighing
 
Laying in weight
Pounded flat
Seas tease
Salt cries
  
GRASSFIRES IN THE SKY
Deep wells of mourning
Sunken, like eyes in a hooded cloak
Waiting to gush
 
Slowly rotating
Blinking light into eternity
Basking in the fright of day
 
Standing proudly
Looking forlorn
She glows
No longer virginal
 
Stars,
Like grassfires in the skies
Tongues of flames
Girdled by kohl
(Nouralgie Art Site, Kakadu NP, NT)
 
FIRE IS THE DEVIL’S ONLY FRIEND
Fiends off fire
Blackens the lands
Strangling life
From torpid grass
 
Fiends fire
Bushes headlong
Toward the saddle
Swamping the plains
 
Fiends of fire
Scream in the lament
Of toasted paws
Lavishing the chase
 
Fire is the devils only friend
 
TREES
Trees pillaring the sky
Bowing under the wait
Of a world
Turned upside down
 
Trees pillowing the night
Restfully awakening
To a moon
Blood red
 
Trees cushioning the morning
Awaiting the onrush
Of air heating
In the furnace of day
 
Trees capturing the earth
Flexing roots
Between soil, grained
By time
 
Trees praying for rain
To reinvigorate meaning
In a desert land
Aching