The Great Western Woodlands

IMM Veronica Brady

I merit merrit and what names

stood longer and will stand again

thin rising to blue sky to charred crow

to red wattlebird and honeyeater

to drown at the foot of waterbush.

Driving east into the Victorian

Mallee, and then the emptiness

of grassed plains that weren’t

grassed plains, where trees

are windbreaks to be harvested,

the essence of the Western

woodlands is clarified.

Its loss would be

an act of terror:

those emptying ‘farms’

that would come in its stead

blank slabs of old-before-their-time

graves, all creation knocked down.

Quandong is a shrub I was

overly familiar with as a child.

In the woodlands I cherish

it for its fruit, and for itself.

It speaks — listen, listen.

It wants its own space,

gets on well with its neighbours,

can take human projections.

But to be deleted is not in its vision.

It hears the pain of loss

as sandalwood does.

We see a lone emu —

we see a lone roo —

we see a lone eagle —

we see a lone ant

making its way home.

They are going somewhere,

having somewhere to go.

This is more than human

intuition. This with the certainty

of a Dundas mahogany

rising out of quartz,

feeling the workings

of the hole-in-the-ground

nearby. Nibbling away.

This great lung,

this great mind,

this great flesh and blood

and cellulose entity

is the powerhouse

of body and soul —

it is the vastly regional,

it is the specific and inclusive,

it is the everything we are.

            John Kinsella

This poem appeared in print version of The West Australian newspaper in September, 2015.