Famous Reporter # 38 - poetry, Roger A. Callen: 'black and white'

ROGER A. CALLEN

black and white

in the gibber, glazed and gathered

the red-earth’s curasse of patterned ground

resides a stain of wind

a splatter of rain and the white slabs of

satin-spar secreted in Neptunian sediments

the round gibber-stones

jostling on this land of shelves and rings

here the scrawny deadfinish with its

yellow puffs of bloom, the scratchy bull-oak

and resinous Callitris

I love this long wide open land

that once I loathed for its bare plains

and drab scrub. Its every fold

returns a miraculous surprise

in Marree where the vandalised ‘Ghan’ rusts

they directed me to outback origins

"Out there, on the road to the dump"

was where the Arabana squats

executed by a false landscape

in tin humpies and abandoned cars

discarded rubbish of white man’s dreams

among the steaming springs where

the boiling bubbles rise, on the mounds

with their salty samphire coat

I looked down on a patch of sand

drifting; among its red grains were some

yellow, some clear, all frosted, angular

over a hard grey cracked clay

i had drifted here from Kent, somehow,

searching for authenticity, abrading my red coat

among the saltating antique sea-sands,

barren flats of oceans

here, a dried bleached stick

some broken kangaroo & splintered sheep bones

white, the stick impregnated with salt, bark peeling

a dung beetle carapace and white webs of grey grubs

among the scraps of dry grass

a parched minuscule of evidence

revelling in the history of wind, sun and

invasions by black and white

myself, part of that invasion, in a place

sacred to old tribes where the waters of life

emerged from ancestral wounds

myself a part of the ungulate invasion

trampling the lean land

even here, life, the decay of mineral -

grains sustaining growth, replication

and among its detritus, fringing the springs

chips of stone carefully worked - knives,

grindstones for grain, scant evidence

of sophisticated wandering lives

imagined, complex, mystical ? magnificent

we white invaders, a culture of material things

revelling in mounds of artefacts, mountains of garbage

our history secreted in concrete, metal and glass

but here only the flowing waters from earth’s bowel needed

and a song, a chant, creating the fabric of life

instituting the universe according to Arabana

a life that does not stain the world

we, the replicators, the cloning conquerors

the agronomists, the purveyors of prisons

before the British, no flogging, no walls

a harmony of fire and grass

forty millennia of success

Roger Callen worked as a geologist and heritage consultant in the deserts of central Australia and now lives in the peaceful Glass House Mountains in Queensland with noisy Rosy. He revels in silence and nature and spent his boyhood on the chalk downs of Kent, UK.