The Blasted Country

THE BLASTED COUNTRY


What is it underfoot? Moon Plains! Unholy Ground?
There is air? There is gravity, like the suction
lint left from a bulldust filter, as the earth falls
all which heaves drops into this elemental trough.

In waste's creation-bowl, the spew and churn
of elements are concocted far ahead of science.
Gypsum-glass mirrors the live knife of the sun
and shivers the earth like a stand-over friend.

The scorched earth's cake is drawn from the oven
spilt with gypsum whiskers, a tin-fuzz turning
of loaves of slope and domes, split to bunkers
in plocks of land-wrack, in valleys of dry bones.

A Wobna-Poorina land: it sucks in crows, ejects birds
of prey, dry leaf takes wing for creatures, and seed
kill is our garden bed, limed with soda to be drinks
for flowers that bud and shrivel up to empty shells.

Here of a time God was the baker cooking the shadows,
forming the hills to catch his ashes, cremating matter
with hot irons in the air, pressed between oven boards
to streams of running slag, molten metals in slow rivers

of death, as poisoned gases rose from beakers of hollow,
the creek, blast-furnace touched blew its valves to fizz
as mercury steam, to popple like fused gunpowders wrought
in worshipping the factoried works of compressed fire

as if Holy Spirit was scarifying its lapsed apostle heads,
its traitors to blood life, agent to hatred gone to worship
at their own violations, so struck, struck blind, struck
dumb, struck down, in lightning upward or dead-ended

in to this trough of evil, the dark waste at the arse-end
of the earth too used to ambivalence to a hope-called life!
Giddi-giddina, earth is the fossil dust of wasted deeds!
Oogeelima, what happed here is a broken grave at its end.

Algebullculla, its spun-off moons absorb, take as sponges.
Giddi-giddina, hostile will will ill will in your face!
The land fizzes with wounds of the planet wars with potions
and the nightsoil is a soda fizz of after-powder at the rim.

Something has thrown cauldrons of sinbane at these earths
we like to love, and the spears of wind now looses our souls
across this chemistry, sowing us wastrel to lost emptiness
where a powdered afterfizz of death draws scars on our face.


* * *

July 1995 - after walking out into the caustic country of the Moon Plains & Hills,
east of the Breakaways, off-road from the way to Oodnadatta from Coober Pedy.
I later found similarly blasted country at the hinterlands of the Simpson desert.