Category Archives: Butan/Barray

by

escape goat

Audio Version

Remember the precious seconds

There is no one

To tie you down

You are only an animal under these trees,

Listening to the cicadas clicking

The two faces you wear

Are an archetypal artifact

You’re the person you hate

Two horns and a dolphin tail

Swimming through shadows

There is no one

Except one

You’re the person you love

Everyone can relax now

Excuses, excuses

Won’t take away bruises

But you fulfil your role

As the bearer of curses

Come, say the spaces

Come to the wild places

Watch the mirror of the moon

Praised in every phase

Oh, Narcissus’ soul-mate

The person you love to hate

Come outside, within

Is a foreign forest of familar feasting

Make me an instrument

Of placid temperament

And elastic sentiment

And ecstatic armament

Remember this precious second

The sheep and the goats are the gate

There is no one to punish

Everyone is an escape

We are animal, vegetable, mineral

Listening, still

by

(Darug) Ngura

If every hill

of every land was cleared

of timber,

as they would call the

Forests

and every grassland derived therefrom

turned into new fortresses

of rock from other lands

tumbled fossils and old volcanic dandruff

turned into these new caves

would we begin to worship the old beings

of Leaf and Limb,

Bark and Branch

purely for their rarity?

If every tangled family

of Mineral and Vegetable

each oikos assembled out of want for

order

food

safety

appeared to you in all their glory,

burning and not consumed

Would you be reborn with each of them?

Bone

Stone

scarcity making sanctity

by

Kamilaroi Calling

I ran towards space and filled it

With noises of escape

Excuses, excuses

The swelling volume of excess

Carnival squeaks of consternation

Betrayal

Until a storm I called for

Broke the silence with myself

One electric round of applause

You made us

As much as we

Hail

Air sky cracking clay

It’s the lines that make the shape

The eons of echoing void,
The godless seasons

And yearning, the amplification

That makes a voice divine.

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Displacement

We’re not an island
Any of us conglomerate
Coastline scarred, sacred, singing
Wave, wave
Wind whale sky
Glass bottle beaches
Old explosions
Noted, not forgotten
We dance them yet under our dying stars
And blood
Famine
Bone-white smoke over bruises
Simmering oils, leaves on hot coals
We want you back, ancient ones
Call us out,
Return us to ourselves

Through your vines and cataracts
We are hearing your commands
Through your starving rivers
We are thirsting for your love
We who were made to be home here
Unnaturally naturalised and by our nature, tame
Tell us your truths. Reverse our death
Resurrection homeland waiting for
Us, children.

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Liminal

Use your edges

Don’t shave them off,

Slice by slice

To please your neighbour

Don’t erode your boundaries

For the sake of saving face

For a false promise of peace

Keep wilderness at your edges

Sanctuary at your core

Value your margins

Life is greatest at the interface

A bifacial blade cuts two ways at once

Value your margins,

The marginal ones

Use them,

Don’t abuse them