Some Words for and from Bracken Fern and Bull Kelp
curled or uncurled under sun you both say with twirling limbs green or not that you have known light like a son i understand and admire you for being home and healing it is not an easy task to be a home thank you for holding the forest swamp ocean floor rockpool scrub
drifting swaying or silent still like a prayer grown of fertile salt or sand or soil womb-like immemorial in which i also bury my unnameable feelings for not knowing or noticing enough about you
swimming alongside you in the ancient ray of water whose reflections remind me of my many privileges while you mimic the moon and soften the land with love with the great sigh out with your shade under shadow you being the altar and i thank you for your balm for soothing the ache and itch the stitch in my hip from the long walk home for returning to me upon different shores under different skies when i was ready thank you for carrying the water despite living in water for not tiring even when we do
Remembering Relic
The rocks and their honeyed lichen remember,
the mountains and their cliff-face remember
the relic,
the sound of tree trunk hollowed never empty
alive under ancestral breath passed circular through lip.
Wind medicine gentle
on rising gum leaf
and star spirit / silent siren
won’t forget
the place where we were born,
won’t forget
the embers enveloping day
or snakeskin soft
in the new branch,
don’t forget
the day it fell to earth,
can’t forget
the lomandra unpicked everywhere
and river water rolling, lapping, licking.
Remember the remembering,
the returning,
the undoing
of hand of heart of home,
and the sacred song that echoes, extracted,
entertaining eternity.
In Red
Behind eyes unopened
I have watched sunlight
and leaf shadow
dance a crimson ceremony,
as hand
follows heartbeat
to trace the landscape
I have only known in
Dreaming
//
An internal painting
carried in ochre,
in birdsong,
in sea shell,
carries me to that place
where everything is crimson:
earth
crushed crab shell
tree resin
the sun, viewed from under the tea tree lake
river stone
snapper scale
fire flame
lilly pilly, unpicked
and everything else edible or not
and the blood that pools since arrival
//
It is all
sacred
and it is all
intact
and it is all
in red
Healing Brambles
Brambles native or not grown of loam
and a prayer in the stone
and scar tissue blue rapture ran up the tree
like scribbly gum markings and new skin symbols silver
are lucid memory and medicine of longing
of surrender and matrilineal breath and birth
the remedy of reclamation
of home
of honey
is healing fossilised in an early moment of you
while I hold milk and dew
to weave an initiation cloth
to cradle transformation stitched of life
and archetypal death.
Finding Home
I hear the call
from out across the floodplains
that separate a home unknown
from here,
too sacred to answer
with this soft song
in foreign tongue,
slimy, slick as it leaves my lips.
Only in blood have I been
to this place, unseen,
and if home is northward,
then red dust falls
between walls of golden sedge
to carry us from here
to there,
where sheets of paper bark
peel back to reveal a story
black against the opal
trunk of tree.
So I carry saltbush
between cheek and gum
to lick the words
from my mouth
before calling back
to Country’s song.