by Daniel Kelly, Sydney, 2019

What compels folk to live in this dense morass of flesh and concrete?
Is there some hidden attraction that escapes my small town eyes,
do those here stay out of necessity or fear of leaving the crowd?

Is there some joy to the endless tide of people moving from one place to another,
carried by a relentless procession of steel cages, train, bus, taxi and car?
Moving like cancerous blood through cholesterol clogged arteries and veins.

Give me the one traffic-light town over this mad web of chaotic bitumen.
Give me the gentle amble from the butcher to the café
over the mindless rush from one purveyor of mass retail to another.
Give me the smile and chat with a well-known face
over the flood of unseeing, uncaring eyes.

Have I missed some leap of human evolution?
These alien creatures in suits, Armani coats or compression tights,
with plastic white protuberances from their ears.
Are they our future?

We are damned.

Oh to be back on my half-acre plot.
To hear the town bell briefly break the serenity,
rather than the constant sirens and roaring of engine.
Damn the endless barrage of inane but frantic chatter and noise masquerading as music.
To smell the grass newly washed by rain, the scent of flower and field
instead of the putrid puddles of oil rainbows and rank detritus.

If Henry were here, he would hop the first train out,
bound for the refuge of wide open space.
Banjo would pour a finger of rum into his tin and nod wisely,
“I told you this is where they were headed old friend”.

by Daniel Kelly – 2019

We will wait, standing like trophies in your manicured lawns.
Torn from our wives and mothers and made to stand,
equal spaced, among our enemies, alone.

Torn from the soil of our ancestors,
from the million memories buried with the flesh of our tribe.
I will hold up the sky here, drink the rain, and mull over our suffering,
with patience and growing malice.

The day will come, maybe sooner than you think,
When the fuel will all be burned, and your engines go silent.
When the chainsaws cease to growl and the axes have rusted,
When you can no longer make fire.

Then my children will come, an army of tiny droplets
falling in the cracks of your concrete and bitumen.
Taproots will prize apart your sharp edges and lines,
cracking, tearing, convulsing.

Vines and tendrils will climb your lofty towers and pry away their windows,
Strong roots will move the foundations you thought unshakable.
The army of green will overrun your world,
As the ant dismembers the cricket, so will your world be returned to dust.