Audio version

This sheep is a solitary beast.

She likes to wander the blackthorn thickets,

The mugga woodlands

The fragrant, prickly heath

Over shale foothills and sandstone crests

Into gullies made by downcutting

Living water laps the dreaming of old seas

She worms through wallaby tunnels and borrows the footpads of errant goats

Sniffs out the shaded meadows of sweet weeping grass

She goes out, she comes back to her haunts and finds pasture

Drinks from the river and listens to the news of the birds

She knows some of the others are concerned

Think she will stumble into a ravine and end there,

Tangled pitifully in blackberry

And on the way she will starve,

Or choke dead on poisonwood peach

Or forget herself and think she’s a fox

Or worse, be torn apart by dogs

She knows that some of the others don’t understand

They think she avoids them out of spite

In truth, the flocks just make her tired

In the paddocks the hay is delicious but far too rich,

To simple and too same

She doesn’t want to grow old and lazy

Walking over the same ground until it becomes dust

Blindly trampling the murnong out of the earth

In truth, she wishes she were a better sheep

That she could take up less room and be gentler,

Less excitable

In truth, she fears as much as she loves the shepherd

Down in the gorge she hears his voice

Echoes of melody through the canyon;

The wingbeats of startled ducks herald his coming

She has not forgotten

How he held her to him when she was a lamb

Or the quick pinch of the tag that pierced her ear,

Marking her as his

She knows that all of this land belongs to him,

That she can never wander far enough to leave it

She knows he has not forgotten her

Knows that wandering makes her hardy

She drinks deeply from the secret creeks

And tells other wild sheep

They are of the one flock.