by the track,
everlastings in bloom; paper-fine heads
that vandals cut for vased reverie.
no heather here, only wildflowers white,
yellow, pinks. everywhere.
today there is no stonemason
only stonemusing, all in a day’s labour.
I find myself gariwording
a kind of “I woz ’ere 2011”
graffiti as old-fashioned texting
marking one’s own,
parking the national poetics
in sleight colonial fashion.
what other histories striate here
everlongingly? land removal &
razed ken notwithstanding. how to read
dys-scriptively, query the quarry
as industrial site or tourist point,
the perfunctory consume & abuse
of sublimity ungirded.
this poem as Babel enfant reconstructs
a monument, stories the stone
once transported to Melbourne
to support State Library sophistries. surplus slabs left
scarred & abandoned. some forms of the past handed on
treasured extract (speaks volumes).
around stark mining huts, three children
hide & seek, a different game
(foxes now baited here)
(try to) pull the chain
of the old trolley rusted on broken lines.
futuring hands find only toy forms
& will not remember this day. except
for three take-home everlastings:
forever keepsakes?
