A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Wildness, still alive

Vanessa Hewson, Victoria, Australia

 

From hotel windows, we marvel, we mourn

the world that we created. Metal, stacked to the sky; 

the earth turned inside out 

like roadkill, shiny, sleek and stiff. Cement, the glue of cities 

holds lonely trees in place, creates a sky-high home 

for a peregrine falcon pair.

 

From a computer screen, I watch them brooding

enveloped by sirens and screeching.

Untamed 

the fledglings fly from their concrete ledge

confident in their wildness.

                         

***

 

It was from the window of a plane that I saw 

my cultivated mind; fragments of wild dreams clinging 

to riverbanks, all other land stark, subdued, cleared and culled, 

segmented. My brain’s soil sown 

with monocultured seeds. 

 

We tuck our children under stories of our success. 

We send their minds to school to be enriched: 

but the system is now deplete. 

I stand before a row of students, their faces 

turned up as if for sunshine. I begin the cultivation. 

 

In the greying stillness of a retreating day

I meet a kangaroo. Body mute 

I fall into his eyes; deep pools of time. 

He thumps his tail and bounds away. 

 

Vanessa Hewson is an educator and poet. She lives in regional Victoria in Australia at a boarding school in the bush where she teaches English and wanders the bush writing poetry. Her poems have been published in Sparx and one of her poems was recently Highly Commended in the Katherine Purnell Poetry Prize.

Two poems by Justin Groppuso-Cook

Two poems by Brittany Nohra