Famous Reporter # 13 - poetry, Brendan Doyle: 'Australia Day'

BRENDAN DOYLE

Australia Day

We are the no soul people

in the not our land.

Old stones in Galway

hide my once heart

and a curragh on an Aran beach

waits still to transport me.

A day was all I spent there

and didn't hear the Gaelic at all.

I was born and bred in Sydney

closer to Kakadu than Connemarra.

We are the ghosts

who gave them trinkets on the beach,

chased them from La Perouse

to oblivion and back again.

I've been to Uluru

in a bus with Japanese

and call this my country.

Brendan Doyle grew up in a house with no books, and so came late to poetry. Now trying to build a house of poems.