poetry | DAVID KERR

Return to the Convincing Ground

We stripped each other bare, helpless as beached whales
on the convincing ground, stranded between
the gearstick and the brake. Next day
a stroll between the cliff edge and the shore
insinuated laughter in the space between our hooded eyes,
defending the memory of entanglement of strangers
where neither knew what carnage had been wrought.

Returning home on that strip of gravel, I watched the moon,
a dish of cream, hanging in the car’s rear window,
recalled the bay, its white furls of sea running in
to sluice the shore: all cancelled, as boulders, truck after truck,
breached the swell, until the slow sea released
an oily stain along the sand: our bruised inheritance.

This summer gouts of flame have razed the hills
to breast and bone, the brazen earth rejecting the sea wind’s
proposition. No more might fire-stick refresh the land;
in their place knobby pots stretch along the cape,
the passage of their plumes tainting the nearer farms.

All trace of Gunditjmara vanished from this place
whose blood once spilled in contest for the whale.
Corroboree no more; where swales of matted turf,
rescued from a tidal flood by rocks and groins,
thatches over bones: the chance remains
of a clan’s denouement, their tale a question mark
concealed in a cryptic name.

© David Kerr

Overland 188–spring 2007, p.82

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