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.