(The Long Paddock is the deepish Australian country roadside verge. This is mostly and essentially Joy's oral story encapsulated by my scribing 'free-verse'. )
On the way back from Sale
a car was flashing lights insistently.
'Maybe a copper up ahead
with speed gun,' Joy said.
Not much further,
strange behavior
4 by 4, verge-side creeping
propping, hazards flashing.
'Oh there's a cow on the road!
On the verge, though,
head down, eating,
knowing good tucker when she sees it.'
Well, if that one had got out
- 'By the barrel of its gut I'd say last night,
been on that lush grass many hours
feisty and reluctant to return
to tawny paddocks of dry straw'-
the next few down the lane were meant to be,
corralled in a section of the 'Long Paddock'
with portable electric fence, farmer
watching from his Toyota.
'In the last big drought - the Millennium,
worst recorded since European settlement -
our neighbor bulldozed out a huge pit
herded three thousand sheep into it
shot them, bulldozed soil on top.
But one week later, walking by, I heard
a godawful buzzing,
demonic,
the Lord of the Flies;
the pit
had risen ten feet up
giant bread-loaf, cracked
apart with bloating corpses,
boiling with flies.
I ran from that visitation,
nightmares for days.
In that drought
farmers were out with dog and horses,
cars and caravans, slow droving herds
down the Long Paddock to survive.
The law says move on every day
(leave a little for the next guy's the idea),
and so they camped and grazed down roads -
one farmer long as nine months,
stubborn old timer
kept cows alive while most gave up
and put 'em down,
worn out by it all.
Farmers committed suicide it's said, then,
one every four kilometers, say, from Sale
to Yarram.'
Song of the Old Timer*
Through many months of little rain
from all our fields the living drained.
Long Paddock is our last recourse;
we'll drive our herd with dog and horse.
Never say die; never say die;
give fate nothing but your steely eye,
and sleep beneath the starry sky.
.........................................
*I wrote it - like a Kipling epilogue to his chapter.
Bonus Poem
Cockatoo Class
The orchard butterfly
alights on my shoulder:
one hundred cockatoos
are silent in the pines.
................
They'd been fussing all morning since dawn, so I think they were quite content to pretend to be a kindergarten class and take an afternoon nap. I had told them to work quietly on their own, after their utter failure at singing Waltzing Matilda, and they shut up completely. One could hear the wind, the cows, the whine of the mozzies (argh) - so, almost bliss.
