Tuesday Poem: “Outback”
Outback
red dirt drifts
along narrow tyre
tracks
heat shimmers
against bleached
sky
a homestead settles
into earth, its last
neighbour
a solitary chimney
– the car slows,
stops
ochre dust
filters through air
conditioning
coats everything:
clothes, shoes,
skin
the screen door sags
on its hinges, hello
echoes
through empty rooms
—
(c) Helen Lowe 2008
Published in Poetry NZ (September 2008)
Having been in Australia for the past week—albeit very much on the coast, here in Melbourne—I thought the Tuesday poem should address an Australian theme.
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[…] Lowe’s Outback expressed what we saw on a recent visit to Australia’s Top […]
A very nice effect, the way — as if the poem itself were filtered through air-conditioning — a verb flows out of every stanza: drifts, shimmers, settles, slows, filters, coats, sags/echoes; the “s” sound creating its own dust, its own echoes.
Thank you, Zireaux
I read this poem at the same time that the Australian election results were announced – it was an interesting juxtaposition between the dying house in this poem and the rural independents’ efforts to get as many concessions as they could for their electorates from the big-city politicians. Whether fast broadband direct to the door of this solitary homestead would make a great deal of difference is debatable – but it certainly wouldn’t fit in such a shapely poem!
Well, I had not seen the political juxtaposition, Tim {grins} but thanks for the ‘shapely’. 🙂