Poem 217

This is about one of those back country badlands farms granted to returning WWI soldiers who found it was impossible to make a go of it … it’s written from the point of view of the spirit of the place – not just the house or the orchard or the ground underneath but the leftover soul of what was meant to be, the place a family gave birth to with hope love and energy but had to abandon …

… title borrowed from the lachrymose country song …

Nobody’s Child

Possums watch the moon with lamplike eyes
fiesta all night long in the plum trees
    the orchard is senile wildly productive
    spilling its bee-stained loads
into long grass
                           the sheep all died
knock kneed shaking fouled down in the mud
but the fruit went from the beginning
straight out of the starter's gun blossoming a civilisation
of its own and an empire in the summer
    the path from the back door is gone under grass
the back door is gone fallen into the grass
the chimney stands like a red-brick woman
in a tin tub caught out when the walls flattened
on every side
                        it was 1927 they walked off
and left me
                     I've played here ever since
like a slow spring
their child they wanted to forget
I grew large in their absence
as the roof fell in