A Cracked and Weathered Prayer

Stretched canvas, a backwater

enamel black in the half-light, and blacker still the swans.

Every morning I get out early;

it’s the hour before dawn,

the middle of my life, and I’ve moved back with my

parents. Domestic entrails lie where they

fall, white goods dumped

around this brackish lagoon. The surface of still water:

I pour myself upon it, heightened

by all that’s commonplace

here. Bitou bush lies like a veil over the sandhills flattened

by miners, who sucked the fat

from the belly, from the face,

from beneath the crested forelock of this titanium littered

coast. Everywhere disowned

things splinter and crack.

They bear the weather’s salty notations, manifold

patterns of memory’s decay.

* * *

A narrow path through deep

banks of melaleuca; a crumbling line of WW2 tank

barriers wait. The Japanese will come

from the north. Alone among

abandoned cars with toothy grins, it’s possible to imagine

the comfort of a woman;

to make my innocent plea.

A bream leaps. Nothing else moves. A pale wash of light

falls as though the sky were walled

with paper screens. Soon

the sun will light the spare tops of casuarinas; for now

they’re women at the water’s edge.

Winner Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize 2015, published in Broken Ground UWAP