by John
This poem is in response to the atrocity of stubble-burning going on at the moment in wheatbelt Western Australia. We have spent two months under smoke from pointless and damaging burns. In the extreme dry (no rain!) the stubble has easily lent itself to complete burnouts of surrounding bushland. And so many old-growth trees left in paddocks are now burnt to ash. A disgrace! And there's a binge of fencing going on, with fencers (and landowners) removing as much vegetation as they think they can get away with.
Graphology
Endgame 74: burn testament burn-off
(i)
The burn-off racket. The windrows flame
out.
The oops,
it got away from us — fire having its way.
Blokes in hi-vis jackets light the stubble
& evaporate.
Highlights to flame against, smoke dousing
bees
where manna-wattles blossom now on edges,
so eruptive to nakedness, the raw
combustion.
Don’t separate off napalm in the
farming-out
of warfare — contrast victor and conquered.
Don’t
lose track of parodic elements, those
satellite furphies
to barely catch out the wanton, the
collateral exposé.
Firebreaks ignored when razing the
fence-line.
Lexical endgame in ‘out of control’; afraid
there’s no
conservation cropping going on here, just
burning
regimes to mock retention. Stubble binds.
Stubble burns.
A week later, we’re back on the same road
to witness
the entire bush-residue burnt out — the
hop, skip and a jump
from paddock to enclave. Ash complements
emptiness.
Summer’s fire-plan is autumn’s clearance
sale in action.
Where we’d admired tall York gums in the
centre of a paddock,
along the spine of the eroded Dyott Range,
we see emptiness.
Fire climbed into branches and wiped out
eras of nests.
Ash and charcoal ploughed into the loam —
warped fertility.
We see power-poles in paddocks protected from
the burning —
thus the selective nature of ‘accidents’.
Growth as mechanism.
We have lived in a humidicrib of smoke for
two months. Singed
and coated lungs. Landowners burning out
the heart of here
as vengeance against the dry, against the
ecosphere
for telling them what’s what. No rain means
more flame.
In this age of destruction, we are expected
to keep
our mouths shut and cop what’s ‘good’ for
us?
(ii)
In this long dry, flames reach higher and
it’s a gamble
grabbed with both hands: the fire-starters
thirsty
for every extra bag of grain or hay-bale
they can eke out.
Shot-term visionaries of the
aggro-cultivated balance sheet.
And where flames don’t wipe out the
remaining trees,
bring
in the fencers! — excise every last tree along
roadsides,
extended domains of felling. These tricks
of demolition — scrolling,
rolling up. Work that into lines of rhyming iambic pentameter —
a colonial metre; or better still, make
comment
and enjoy the indifference of movies or
game-stations
in open forms. Poetry accommodates what is as long
as it sparkles in display —
pseudo-ritualistic burning-off
being the way of it, the sun a red goitre
in the encarboned sky.
And Stephen Hawking, O prophet of humanity,
instructs us
that ‘resources’ will be used up (too fast, too fast) within a hundred
years,
not a thousand, and we’d better hop to it
and get out there
colonising space (I thought that’s what had been happening
all along). Hawking might like to visit the
Western Australian
wheatbelt to see humans cutting off their
noses to spite
all other faces, to see the eco-system of a
tree
go up in smoke at the one time of year
we might hope to avoid bushfires — this
is the psychology and skills we’ll take out there
from here, the green eye on green planets
to make bare.
The smoke of lit fires across the planet
blankets
the future. It hasn’t rained and the
farmers
can’t crop so they burn (working hard —
leaving
the burning unattended) — to expand, to
make ready,
to add the quintessence of their
agriculture
to cracking the world’s pastoral-ismo
enigma code.
The feeders, the fed, the feeding: eat
what’s served up
on our plates. Not every farmer, of course
— no one size
fits all, but people stand and suffocate
bewildered,
not knowing what to do. Firies who fight summer fires
light late-autumn fires and have a barbecue
afterwards.
Just one scenario, but it’s all in play at
the moment.
And those few colonisers out there, who
will wreak
development on other worlds, will think
back to what
they’ve left, the billions dying, and say,
all those plumes
of smoke, those destroyed trees, those
genetically
modified crops replacing evolution. For our
sakes.
We carry the genes of Stephen Hawking
in phials around our necks: ancestry,
the burning that brought false fertility
hard to pick out on this bloody
and smoky event horizon we cease under.
(iii)
We
are not alone. A letter to the Toodyay paper
pointing out that such burning-off is
illegal.
And another in the York paper. Rain doesn’t
come, so the burning continues. Into the
ash,
the GM canola implants. Air-seeders,
dust plumes. Last year there were families
in the crops — bumper green — to leitmotif
the media. Happy families as the earth
contracts.
(iv)
The colours of a polluted sunset are simply
awe-inspiring.
I won’t fill in the wild and muted and
angry colour chart —
that’s just a little indulgent, isn’t it?
Giving you something
sensuous to get a grip on, dig your teeth
into. That’d be
making art out of the horror — finding
beauty in the
last gasp. But I’ve seen many land-owners
standing
on the edge of their spreads (it’s the year
of America)
admiring their handiwork, the kickbacks of
nature.
(v)
The eagle flying mid-range between the
burning
and the hills, waiting for the dash of
rodents
and even reptiles who are this way and that
with the late heat, the dry, but shorter
days.
The eagle flying mid-range between the
burning
and the hills, watches its eyrie flamed-out
of the tall tree
that has survived the bushfire seasons to
be ashed
so the tractor can get a clear run on
profit’s ingress.
(vi)
In Ireland it’s blasphemy to question God’s
ironies of fire and water — the
conflagration
that has turned even bones to ash. It’s all
goodness on the statute books, and local
spirits know what’s good for them
as the earth is made bare; even
that place of the Saint Finbarr —
Gougane Barra — watching the mountains
in flames, the vegetation rising as cinders
to make false haloes over the lake.
Gorse fires without restraint.
Consequences. Subtexts. Blasphemies.
(vii)
Harvest of flame.
Time and a place.
Now a consequence
for nature that has
nowhere else to go.
Harvest of flame,
the world’s punishment
for suggesting ‘restraint’.
All that precedent
lost to the industrial
grotesque — the natural,
the ritualistic, all dragged
into the coffers; the products
we ‘need to have’, force-
fed, choking on abundance,
harvest of flame.
(viii)
Sick moon? What is
the magpie mimicking?
And the mistletoebird?
The trees knocked over by the digger
and burnt — we saw it happening.
No gathering to stop it.
Nothing. No case
to answer. Sick moon?
You rise large and diminish.
Consortiums and governments
are aiming to mine you soon. Soon.
Burnt off constantly by the sun.
Tawny frogmouths
suffocated by smoke.
On the moon, too — see them fly past,
and fall. Less gravity, but enough
to bring down, to hold the dead.
Evening star — fire-starter?
Tawny frogmouth — smoke ghost.
The gods are alive and walking
and flying and swimming and crawling
and existing on the earth — today,
and for the last couple of months,
Gods here have been burnt out
under the camouflage of burning-off,
of adding trace elements to a soon-to-be
heavily fertilised soil, to remove
the inconvenient chaff piles
and trees, of replacing
fences with new fences
and clearing vegetation
as process. These live gods
made dead. Multiplying
but finite blasphemies.
Evening star — fire-starter?
Nocturnal day-walkers.
Bruised clouds.
(ix)
You dare compare your acts
with the use of fire by Aboriginal people
as a means of being one with their country?
You dare compare your acts
with the use of fire by Aboriginal people
as you burn country you stole from them?
You dare compare your acts
with the use of fire by Aboriginal people
when you divide and conquer, leave nothing
alive?
(x)
Smoulder. Rouse. Conflagrate.
It’s easy to balance the equation.
Emulsified testament suspension.
Conflagrate. Rouse. Smoulder.
-->
John
Kinsella
