Venie Environmental Poetry Prize

They navigate by stars and the earth’s own iron,
a thousand kilometres of spring dark
on wings you could read newsprint through,
bound for the granite country, the cool caves
where they tile the walls in their sleeping thousands,
each with its head beneath a neighbour’s wing,
an aestivating city, waiting out
the plains’ white furnace in the mountains’ cellar.

That is the route, sung in them since the ice.

But the way south now crosses a strange dawn
that stands all night above the lake shore:
a hill of light, a flag on steel mast,
the great lit building full of arguing,
and the stars they steer by drowning in its wattage.
They come down in their soft confused milliards
onto the forecourt marble, into the foyers,
furring the down-lights of the members’ bar,
committee rooms adjourned for moth removal,
the vacuum trucks by morning on the ramps.

In the mountains, the caves keep cooling anyway.
Stone the colour of a moth’s wing waits
with room, this year again, for more than come.
The old men of the high country remember
walls that rustled like a single animal,
and stand in the emptying silence of it now,
hats off, the way you stand in a closed church,
listening to the granite forget its tenants.

And still, each spring, the survivors lift
out of the black-soil plains at dusk and go,
past the lit hill, its noise, its blazing order,
correcting, correcting for the burning stars,
carrying the old map through the new sky.