A Fiercer Light

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There are almost-silent footfalls
                                                          wind covers,
prints,
           dust and gum-scraps disguise,

You say it's my imagination
but imagination's the apparitor of history*
summoning testimony to court our senses:
internal echoes play on the skin of the eardrum;
shadows are projected upon the visual field,
for what you know endeavors to become,

though the wind blows it and the gum trees drop
their offerings of bark and leaves.
                                                                Sometimes
it feels beneath their avenues still stand still figures
robed in dusk remembering when this land

tree-dressed, ran with  easy streams
in folds of its wolds, creeks and billabongs
stiff with yabbies and freshwater mussels,
waterfowl and their eggs. 
                                                    A paradisal living,
for the land  bore muntries, secreted
daylily roots and murnongs,  provided
soft furred possums, waddling echidna,
mobs of grey roos...
and the mothering sea, not so far away,
stocked with fish, clam, pipis aplenty.

Now the canoe-tree stands sole witness
but for constant wind
over the rolling tawny fields,
singing the story of deforestation
in its dry way,
the over-greedy pasturing
to anyone who cares to listen;

(oh, screech away, cockatoos)

but if a site of massacre is found
well -who wants to be reminded
of their own family history, the skeletons
heaped in that stolen closet
claimed for generations
fait accompli,  hidden under the bridge
flash flooded in winter.

There is deep shadow
in the paddock at salmon sunset
under the dark pine,
but that's the nature of pine trees;
they shaded the cottage of Chaucer's reeve,
they shade the reave of Gippsland too.

....................

*That pithy and poetic truism 'Imagination is the apparitor of history' (it may have been originally 'science' ) is not my own invention. I read somewhere  several decades ago but can't remember who wrote it. These many years I have obviously been subconsciously dying to include it in something. ;)