Over red clay that’s been turned for my Dad’s tombstone

between dates inscribed in gold I’m calculating ratios:

years of darkness and harvest, weight of a feather, weight of a soul,

lands left behind, and in the end come here to ground

 

where neighbours, unused to the exotic species who’d appeared in their midst

still lent them money for a cottage when the banks demurred.

I remember that patrician welcome (as no-one else can now)

agreement reached over a back fence, finding common ground

 

though he still sought a library, a theatre, a newspaper, a coterie

where the old language enveloped him in its warmth.

That’s what we spoke indoors.  If we had to travel miles

for Sunday schools and shared memories, we weren’t adrift or aground

 

in the picket and weatherboard props of our first act. He always said

he was glad the papers from Australia had arrived before the others;

dismayed when after some years he visited old comrades abroad,

their dark little apartments and indifference to one another ground

 

at his soul.  He took the rituals and duties of citizenship seriously.

‘It’s a good country’ he’d say, right to the end.  But now, by that reckoning,

I find my own gratitude falters, faulty.  Yes, we were welcomed;

I clowned and roamed with the pack in the school grounds

 

and in jobs like lit carriages, that crossed the mistier

and further landscapes of my life, never heard a curse to live by; yet

something has failed to flourish in this suburban top soil

there’s something in thankfulness can’t get off the ground

 

when country itself has gone to find its people

following echoes of their songs in places

we barely acknowledge in naming them for what they are:

Great Sandy Desert.  Table Top Mountain.  Stony Creek.  Picnic Ground.

​

Shortlisted, ACU Poetry Prize November 2025