My Home is Red, the Land is Dry
Short poem for Australia
Wide open valleys and cool evening mosses,
My heart extends west to my love and my losses.
As the closure of borders dulls my resolve,
I think of my home and this sickness dissolves;
Nothing can nourish my spirit or widen my eyes
Like the land I have left, as I mourn its demise:
There, with awaiting relations,
Cousins unseen and aunties unkissed,
A land of vast distances and desert train stations —
A land of burnt sands and dreams I have missed.
Above this ceaseless land-mass,
The eye of the sun shimmers like brass,
Unfailingly surveying its rocks and red dust:
My love of this land reaches far beyond lust —
In canvas of sea, of deep diamond blue,
In spectrum of greens of all shade and hue,
An ointment for stress and tonic for pain,
An agent for joy as soothing as rain.
Oceans of time, acres of trees,
Have carved into Earth a haven for me;
Where heat is dependable and sunburn inevitable,
Where sands twine between toes and lodge inside shoes,
Where satin water of crystalline blue
Drowns every sorrow,
While I am relentlessly true
To the land I have left and am due to return,
To the land I have left and the home that I yearn.
