If there’s tears in the reflection the grieving has stopped.

A mosquito hovers slowly. I can’t kill it. These blood suckers may be a blessing after all.

It’s decisions like this that can kill a person.

A mosquito bite.

Like the decision to face the world with your tears

The decision to call the thunder

The decision to circle the moon.

The decision to stare at a bullet casing

The only choice to love it all

Enough to follow the rhythm of the cicadas out into the night

To bath the tears in the star lights.

Art will just be used by fascists in the end.

They’ll point to it as proof that we were the inferior culture.

“Check out the blurred lines

The unfinished sentences,

The unresolved cadences,

The hanging rocks

The after shock

It’s hardly fine art

We paint the streets beautiful with children’s blood.” the fascists will brag.

The spearhead and the bullet casing remember the old stories, buried deep in the mud

The fire owns the waterfall

The bush turkey owns the earth

The clouds own the birds

The song owns the currawong

It never sung of slavery either,

But of the hope that comes from grief.

Don’t sing songs of war in major keys

If there’s tears in the reflection

Then the grieving has stopped.

The fig trees hold space for the sadness and bones

Painted with ochre. Carried with love.

In the desert a pump sucks the old people from the ground.

The water gives birth to a well.

We clear out the water holes so that travellers can drink

I let the bush turkey bury me deep until I can taste the blood.

We dig up a bullet casing

We dig up a spear head.

We take and we give without time to explain

Before I melt

Before the sun sets

Before the trees turn from green to black

Before the cicada’s scream

Before the ship sets sail

Before the dew settles

A rock with my scent on it tells the lake I’m diving in.