to the season a fig tree barks with verdant persistence on

a shapeless sharp stone knoll

it's hot on this dry desiccated morning

What other disasters slide to ground beneath her roots into black depths in pursuit of levity

They all know I’m 75% water, to linger may sate my curiosity and quench their thirst

This blanched ground grips her fauna,

Forcing it to ground between raised limestone rolls and tumbles

the cycads gather in the…

In The Antipodes talk of war is easy and fitting, as it is here as it was in the beginning, and with these words becomes the rhythm, the drumbeat and the gossip even after the blood is long ago drained away and replaced by the bronze of the Palaeolithic age, as if the electricity of a nation is forged in the furnace of news far away from these marsupial shores in the fields of Flanders and France and over there on Turkish beaches and over there in the jungles beyond the straits and over…