Basalt decks the plain.
You see it dot the earth like a broken wall,
cast up by kilometres of coast crushed when continents split.
Gondwana gone, wastes of Antarctica cleaved, sulphur spewed from seabed;
and so all the grasslands of the West are salted by bluestone,
substance of homes – a hut, roofed with turf; a town to be seen,
when the white men came, then misunderstood, discarded, burnt –
or else a barrier, a wall.

I am the son and heir of all this messy,
teeming stuff: shed, scattered, shattered, spread.
Inheritor of a debt, a crime,
a guilt that what is mine is stolen,
and all this high-heaven-stink that clings to my skin, my genes:
all this
someday will be yours,
my sons who clamour and call in the backseat; all this
tangled stuff of death and dirt, and life,
somehow life,
teeming in it all like a wild
subterranean flow
of grace.