1965
published in The Northern Churinga volume LIII–1965
poem
Spark the red earth
to and from
God comes and God goes
and I am born,
kindling the dry mulga of my coming spirit.
And the teachers lift and smother
and the moment’s fire is smouldered and gone.
I grew round in the smallness of men
‘till I met a flame with the largeness of honesty,
cool as the molten orb of the rising sun
we watched, changed,
became one in the sun
which even now ticks its vortex of glory
across the sky like some great river,
in effortless magnificence, supersensitising
communion.
A coitus of Sun and Moon
and a clean pink-yellow swept
chalice leaps among pure stars –
in joy, fear. She-I approach the truth,
trepidant, like a droplet bird,
but burning in a Sturt stone stillness of endless
desert mornings,
a twinge of song twists existence from the air,
sharpening the dawn with gold.
Written in 1965 in class A3 of Launceston High School and published in the school magazine The Northern Churinga volume LIII–1965 (no page number). For publication, the editors of the magazine changed the word ‘coitus’ to ‘union’. They may have changed some spelling and capitalisation and lineation, too. And perhaps ‘supersensitising’ was originally spelt by me as ‘supersensitizing’ and ‘trepidant’ as ‘trepident’.