#69 Kevin Brophy 'Perseverance all around'

I read a John Kinsella poem about St John the Baptist. The school across the road here is the John Pujajangka-Piyirn School—The school of Desert John. This morning I saw large tracks of a beast in the road outside, a camel cutting through town I thought, but no, it was the loose heifer roaming for grass around our corner. This could be a cattle station. I watch Indigenous TV, where the master of the Ernabella Choir talks of the beauty of Pitjintjara for song since all its words end in long vowels. He talks of having a real donkey and a real camel at nativity plays, and the fullness of the sound a camel makes when emptying its capacious bladder while a choir sings a hymn. John Kinsella writes of a ‘dry perseverance’ on the land. A man knocks on my door and we talk, while the choir sings behind us on the television, about how one might manage to write poetry in this place. A woman with a child knocks at the door a little later to ask if we have furniture we are throwing away. I need a cupboard, she says. Six daughters, seven grandchildren, and cousins. We walk to the school along a dusty track across the oval in single file.