after Luke 1:46–55
1
Tyres hold to gravel. She
takes her breath
sings each revolution’s puff
of dust. Middle road
a snake suns and wheels’ ambit
accommodates her line. Look
back she chants see
the reptile still against
tales she’s heard of serpents
clinging to the rim and found
alive next stop down
the local access track.
2
All that’s left of the school
her nanna ran and where
married a lady could
not hold a teacher’s job
is a sign in a paddock. Here
forebears learnt their names.
She reads them now on
honour boards and on a street
and sings a partway song
of women white and wanting.
3
This is Ballardong land
where her mother watched
a woman maybe a girl
work laundry in a copper.
This was a person of Country
in the gaze of a settler child.
She sings recompense
sufficient to the labour
for all unpaid
she lives because.
4
What woman assisted her
nanna with births at home
on the farm? She sings
their favour a wisdom
shared on Country once
more usurped when a child
is born to inherit. Can
she carol the
sorry gifts that
made her mother?
5
She psalms a longing
to undo that cannot
be. She sings to tell
a truth: this colonial
cultivar this ripped
space this cleared out
orbit-visible belt whose
indentured labour shames
her family but does not
threaten their lives. She
takes a breath sings
out of an old frontier.
Coda
She stops, she
listens
This poem first appeared in Rabbit Poetry Journal 30 (2020), pp. 108-11. It is also included in my collection Obligations of voice (Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2021). In Reading the Magnificat in Australia: Unsettling Engagements the poem appears as an example of a creative response to the Magnificat from a settler perspective in the context of the ongoing colonial invasion of Australia.
The epigraph, ‘after Luke 1:46–55’, refers to the biblical text of the Magnificat, spoken/sung at the end of the Visitation episode (Luke 1:39–56), when the Lukan Mary, on hearing that her older kinswoman Elizabeth is pregnant, journeys to visit her in the Judean hill country. The poem transfers this journey to the Western Australian Wheatbelt. I first read about the visibility of the Wheatbelt from space in Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017), p. 1.
Anne Elvey
Sun Glint Drift 