Venie Environmental Poetry Prize

Escape that bitumen
travel until travel to where

You see a woman (man)
scapes before you

the man (woman) may
not claim to being poets

Girl – Boy – leaves
Grass tree
Tribal country
Music
Painting
Body art
Song & Dance

Indigenous *** beginning
(false end-

there is absolutely nothing niIzerozilch to stop invasion from being provisional down to country

Cutting through home paddocks
On my way to town where
Perched on its exhausted fin
Of ring road and main artery
To study form
The form cars take
Have taken
Somewhere on far off highway
A windscreen shatters
Begging to be pieced together

I’m walking not driving
So to not feel criminal
I drive a higher bargain
Pulling a crook’s balaclava
Over clouds of abused nature
A State Reserve befriends me
So I veer there
Treading lightly never tiring
Of seeing wild flowering
Myrtle and leschenaultia
Spider orchid and kangaroo paw
Setting into colour
Hinting darker eyes darker bodies
Stranger names

Beneath twin towers of jarrah and marri
Understory prickles and saplings strip
While phytophthora threatens Banksia

From a sandy clearing
Skidding into gravel pits of abandoned junk
Rusted car bodies and beer cans old and
New
Cultural biomass festers
Amid dead microbiological activity

Further on crows caw
While Korijekups
Black cockatoos trailing fire under belly
Spitting leaf twig and gum
Urge me on …

To bitumen

Rusted bonnet and boot down
Ready to buckle up and under
Trim taut and metallic
Seeing red as any power walker
Cape in hand & red read ready
For the local bull totem
And the charge through town

Or is that the local bush fire brigade
Practising in the event of a forest
Fire marriage

Coldies hand in hand while white Marri
Blossom rains nuts on a tin shed

Sky

(ing thus

far *****