‘a sunburnt country’ is a phrase from Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’
Â
here where men are busily at work
carving out new
deserts where wild
boronia once grew
rivers running rapidly
dry, wallum frogs croaking by
their thousands as sag-skinned cattle
carcasses graze on empty acres
fenced against an inland sea
one more migrant tide
repelled, kangaroo shot through
at sunset — their sorry hide
blanching over bleaching
bones for
daring to outrun
the culling gun
on
this new battlefront
where parched and starving natives
are run
aground swarming from
new deserts carved out
by men
busily at work where wild
boronia once grew
rivers running rapidly through
and wallum frogs once croaked
by their thousands
© Anne Casey, longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize 2018 and published in signs anthology (University of Canberra 2018)
Picture 10214900, unattributed engraving, circa 1850, image copyright Mary Evans
Originally from the west of Ireland, Anne Casey is an internationally award-winning Sydney-based Irish poet and writer. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for 30 years, her work is widely published internationally, ranking in The Irish Times Most Read. Author of three critically acclaimed books published by Salmon Poetry – the light we cannot see (2021), out of emptied cups (2019) and where the lost things go (2017) – Anne has won poetry awards in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, most recently the American Writers Review Competition 2021. She is the recipient of an Australian Government Scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney.   anne-casey.com  @1annecasey
Choose PDF type:
