Woodford Island

A circuit around our home....

Out

circling the island

on my bicycle its own

wheels circling round and round

in mini orbits of space, measuring out

the dimensions of this place with their small circumference

repeated over and over and over

till they reach my home

the place where I

began.

This circumnavigation

moves me through cane fields

chlorophyll green under the yellow

sub-tropical sun which

only plays at Winter -

straying its track just a little North

each day till the Solstice brings it home

slowly, reluctantly, like an errant child

called back by their Father.

It’s August now and the fields are stitched together

by narrow roads and lanes, the seams

of drainage ditches, lines of trees

and here and there the hard won knots of

farmer’s houses, silvered steel machinery sheds,

fences, and old abandoned barns 

with a stubborn existence  long outlasting names

or purpose, now becoming something else.

And over it all a late Winter sky hazed

a pale blue like a fake Summer,

artificially aged and counterfeited

by the sticky sickly smoke of the cane fires

which erupt each evening, erratically,

each time a different place, pumping

pallid volumes of light brown smoke

into the air over the Clarence;

scraps of black carbonised cane leaf

drifting down in the night, silently,

to speckle lawns, roofs, washing,

and the pale upraised faces

of children wondering;

memories forming.

But my feet circle, powered by my need to feel this,

to eat this, consuming all I see and converting it

 to another energy, like the sugar soaking the sap

and the substance of the green leaves I whirl between -

burnt, slashed, harvested, sucked up and collected,

crushed, pulped, juiced of everything and heated

catalysed, crystallised to pure thought burning,

burning….

Around me the island, the slick silvered river

pricked with the splash of fish, dolphins, slashed

by the keels of the boats and over it all

the sun, rising, winched up by the rope of the morning

cinched tight by the tension of time by my wheels

turning

turning

turning

David