More Beeliar/Coolbellup Bushland Poems

The bush is being torn away as I write. It's a scene of horror. Hundreds of people doing their best to stop it. Three new poems.

Horror

Failure in-situ — what can be written

as butcher birds clarify the rise and fall

and fall and fall? The Coolbellup woodlands

where zamia palms spike your conscience

on the path — those trees would be good

to inhabit, to ward off the bulldozers,

the employees of the contractors,

prepped to counter protests

shallow in their psyches — jobs to do.

Failure in-situ — what can be written

as the police encircle, ring the wagons,

protect the destroyers? Chat with them,

find the flaws, or treat them as alien.

Either way, either way. As organisation

fragments in the empty shadows, in the vast

cavity of drill and scour, the root canal

of hate. Glib as the wattlebird scurrying

into the dusty air, the fun-fair tree falling away.

Failure in-situ — what can be written

as wound widens, as lexical fluctuations

upset even the certainties of horror? New

inflections in the oldest concept, the oldest

truth of all. The horror spreads and on the outer

we wonder at the silence, to circumnavigate

and find the organs of the body stripped out,

this cannibalism which is celebrated as ‘progress.’

The realm of apocalyptic literature grows.

            John Kinsella

Accounts — to the Premier of Western Australia

I hold you accountable for the trauma our thirteen-year-old

is going through as habitat for the birds he loves is destroyed.

I hold you accountable for the emphysema of the biosphere,

that gasp you add to our last gasps, deoxygenated, stranded by the road.

I hold you accountable for the zoo of death, for the ark scuttled

and going down with all hands on board, for survivors shot on the surface.

I hold you accountable for helping boil the planet in its own oil,

for encasing it in bitumen dredged from the pits of hell.

I hold you accountable for making science a convenience store

in which well-fed bullies stuff their baskets without paying.

I hold you accountable for cruelty and torture, for casualties

you don’t acknowledge, for ignoring alternatives to feed your vanity.

I hold you accountable for treating life as a game in which winner

takes all, a psychology of childhood instilled by abusive adults.

            John Kinsella

A Failure of Empathy

In the tragi-comedy of streets,

the Shakespearean momentum

of anniversary, police approach

a child carrying a sign that asks

what’s to become of his future.

In silence, he stands, facing

contractors and police,

and all is in that moment,

the bush falling to the blade,

the police ready to counter

any threat.

            John Kinsella