T/here

By Judith Bishop

This is not a place for candles, or the scent of red cedar
gathered on a hill to burn, or native plum, lit at night
to hold the urgent dead at bay: you won’t wake to hear
the click of brumbies’ hooves on a road that flows
to where the humans are, or blink to see the mob
jittering in the dawn air:
                                this is not a house
of language, in the first sense of the word, the one
in which it made the world, this is not a place of origin,
ground, or single source: this is not a road for drinking
in the middle of the night: you won’t see
the ink of fire moving night and day across
the blotting paper of savannah, or the scorched paperbark
raining through a reddened dusk:
                                              and this is not a place
for gathering the raw fruits of the earth, or to learn
the names for lily root, honey, paperbark,
nor to hear the many uses
to which an axe gets put:
                                 for that is not a life
of plainness in the hope of life unending, nor a way
of being gentle on the earth.
                                      Here, you meet
no women keening for the death of only sons
on the lamplit urban roads, rock to skull, beating down
the dumb refusals of the mind:
                                          and this
is not a place for dreaming
on the memory of rocks, or to hear the rain that drops
as though a sea were in the sky, or watch erosion
on a scale both intimate
and eons wide.
                        From these walls I cannot read
the lineage of human lives.
Manyallaluk, NT; Sydney, NSW