Tuesday, December 13, 2016

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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