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Famous Reporter 17

Currajah

 

BRENDAN RYAN

---

Morning After

I stand with my father

in the tyre marks of fire trucks

looking across paddocks burnt beyond words.

Paddocks he has ploughed, raked, sewn, harvested,

walked in his head, in his dreams.

Wind-blown paddocks he has scanned into memory.

The same paddocks we have talked into arguments.

 

The past is scorched, but its heat

rises through my workboots.

My father shakes his head, sighs,

scuffing his boots in the ashes of a fence post,

"You wouldn't credit it."

 

A skinless calf hobbles from a drain,

whispering beneath tangled fencing wire

the husk of a strainer post.

The strip of bush I explored as a child

has been left in black slivers.

There is a cemetery quiet my father

won't admit. He spits, rattles change

in his pockets, as smoke climbs

off a new horizon.

 

Behind us a bulldozer fills a pit

with burnt cows. Their skin

has been toasted the same grey colour.

Are they Jersey, Friesian, or Hereford?

They fall from the bulldozer's bucket in clumps

ten at a time, sideways, headfirst thudding

into place amongst the flies.

              Some cows miss the hole

and land broken-necked, half-in

half-out, forcing the operator

to scoop them up and start over again.

 

A siren wails through charred gum trees

lining Heathmarsh Rd.

Beneath the dirt, tree roots and peat bogs

smoulder and glow. Everything

we've ever leant against

has been shelled and scattered.

We walk back to the Valiant

through paddocks without fences.

The day rests between the hands

of a melted clock, the search for stray cattle,

and back to back hits of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

---

Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm in Victoria, and is currently studying English at La Trobe University.