Gibber

GIBBER


Coin of what Empire?
Pellet lead of which dead?
Stone of whose battlefields?

When muzzlewars blew
The stone ages away, who left
All this fired shot, this gunmetal?

Relic nailheads, rough-nuts
Missilites in vast scatterings
Like double-barreled shot across

The outback. The mortar damage remains.
And mortality still comes too easy, where
The dead are more than the living.

What war cruelled here, tortured lands,
Where battles dug the metal pepper in
And blowflied the people to dust?

What battalions of men, what platoons
Of flesh were hung and quartered in this wind,
We dried of bones, bones pockmarked to grit?

Salt sting and sand desert that land
Away, and leave only shrapnel and scudshot;
The killing pellets, gibber sand

The massacre weapon filled with bolt-headed
Stone, the bullets of clustershot, spread-shot
Now gravelling a caution-riddled earth

Assaults where no one now fights, in this
Disarmed no-man's land between ghosts blown
Wraith battles militated into a lull of peace

With conspiritorial posturings the wraith warrior
Goes at wardances across these gibber plains
Sending a rain of idiot shot

From these tightfisted handfuls of surface stone
Handfuls of stone he throws back at heaven
Gibbering, gibbering like someone.

* * *

- written for gibber deserts - the red-rounded pebble-covered soda-formed landscapes along the Oodnadatta Track and its surrounding districts - after William Creek, Witchelina, Curdimurka, Strangways, Irrapatana, across the north of Woomera towards Coober Pedy