Friday, December 30, 2016

Flying in from Canada, 2001: A Tribute to Our Historians - Day 28 -Sara Dowse

Pools, from on high I saw them,
like a god (excuse me: goddess).
I looked down, they looked a bit
like turquoise tears.

The goddess in me then
snapped my fingers,
summoning a younger sight:
Dawn, when the good ship Orcades
went inching through the Heads,
and we scrambled in our pyjamas
to have a look
from the crow’s nest.

There, laid out before us
were the sclerophyll shorelines
Phillip saw, absent too, the people.
He thought there were none,
that the land was empty
ready for the taking, empty
as the swimming pools I saw later
from the air.

More fools we.
They’ve been there all along,
watching, waiting,
in the woods that fringe the shorelines.
Inside a cove the Sirius
slipped past (and then the Orcades),
women fished from their nowie,
stringing their lines through hands
of four fingers and a half.

Little is hidden now,
when, like a goddess,
you can see from the sky.
   




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