More on the Beeliar Protest and Resistance - Environmental Activism and Poetry

Beeliar Protest Verbs

Killing jar, these wetlands

for government gameplay:

ventricle, atrium, white-tailed

black cockatoo. Jarrah resonance.

Imaging reptiles, marsupials. Boodjar.

Fence up to cull otherworldly.

Clean house.

*

Bulldozer. Catch-all.

Taxonomy overload.

Aesthetes shrink before

what’s to come. Non-

art. Tasteless. How many

words did Milton offer

the English language?

How many words

did the English language

steal from the Noongar people?

*

We saw light and blood seep

from the guttered banksia candle:

like premonition, we shrive

in this belief the worshippers

encased in buildings won’t

listen to. But some do,

their houses on the edge

of another way of living,

persisting.

*

James sends us a photo

from the Beeliar bushland —

a killed bandicoot shovelled up

and shown to motorists passing,

motorists who might soon

be taking the piece of highway

about to be inserted where

the bandicoot’s habitat

once lay, where the bandicoot

lived against the odds,

respite from the suburbs.

*

Management plan profiteering to CEO permission

open slather surface tension to glint a growth ring

absorption to freight blind snake unto pobblebonk

to delete quenda and value-add quality of life sink

bores to test the overlay presence of sealant while

rainbow bee-eaters ploy in dugouts to tip into refuse

removed from site as security only does its job in a pay

packet survivalist way forgive and forget and implement

bonfire and hope for camaraderie in this global singularity

this one season of consuming what’s left lest we miss out

lest we’re deprived in comparison deft dressing vanities

while recountings get relegated to books and stories

work overtime to lift the lost to deny the extermination

as it will be forgotten what was before the rapid transit

voting patterns as free as Trump Tower as free as bums

on seats in proliferating stadia to keep gladiators on

project and whose ancestors push against the blades

of the machines — have you ever seen the z-grade

movie Killdozer, dozer which comes to life mind

of its own all hyped up with agency and sugar

in its tank, in its belly, in its brutal table manners,

subtexts colonial unawareness the roadmap of Southern

Cross and sky on the ground and magpies waking to loss

as democracy makes tarmac Ö plain song, progredi, headway.

            John Kinsella

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