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- DAEL ALLISON
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two poems
Lighthouse
1882
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- Science and endeavour reduced
- to a failing point of flickering light.
- No foundering craft can bear the
- burden of defence against wildness.
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- All that light, 10,000 candles yet
- no sight had through the battered dark,
- and above the overturning rage of waves
her
- banshee wail; Help us John!
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- Beyond the useless light the night is
- solid. Glued by keening air he is a
- straining point high above the
- grind of sea and rocks.
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- Palms and knuckles white, fear
- has him clamped to the rail at the
- trembling rim of the light’s eye
- unseeing, ears straining to the din of
sky.
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- Her voice a shadow slit in the searing
- bright, shrill as tearing silk
- rending life from him. Wife,
- both sons, mind and heart unstrung.
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- All that is certain riven, driven by
- wind shriek too soon upon the shore.
- The earth lurches at the boiling brim
- of sea. He leans to hear again her cry
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- and know it true; that here in the sky
- at world’s end the world is ending.
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Tasmania: Extinction Keening
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- West from India the granite swell
- sloughs through sea-wrack
- and off slick backs of seals
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- to broach this coast with a
- slap and clattering of kelp.
- Hunched against the ocean,
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- listing on another dreaming, our
- hut leans into fretty layered midden,
- shell-on-shell, another time
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- still sung in word and memory,
- silt-bound and fused in sand. Grey
- sea, sucked back through green-black
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- orifice, sliding deep down throat
- of shell, is held at bay. Bleached
- bull-kelp antlers big as walrus
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- bones stand guard; the barrow
- beached and cached with shell and
- shattered quartz, the monarchs
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- dead; shadow woman, tiger, saw-tooth
- lake extinct, dragged down by sea wolves.
- Rattling shell and stone chant battle
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- tales, off the soughing sea the mourning
- western wind howls echoes of the dirge.
- Along the shore a stilted keening bird
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- cries eternal ululation. Its fragile
- skittering sand tracks write
- ephemeral haiku.
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