A portrait headshot of a woman with dark hair and a black boatneck top against a black background.

Amanda Anastasi

Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet published both locally and internationally, including in Best of Australian Poems, Best Australian Science Writing, Australian Poetry Journal, Griffith Review, Cordite Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Amanda is the author of ‘Taking Apart the Bird Trap’ (Recent Work Press, 2024) and ‘The Inheritors’ (Black Pepper, 2021). Amanda was Poet in Residence for three years at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, where she used poetry to communicate the climate crisis. She was a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and received a Nielma Sidney Literary Travel Grant from Writer’s Victoria to write at the Great Barrier Reef. Amanda was recently commissioned by DFAT’s Climate Change Diplomacy Branch to write a poem for COP30 Brazil.

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The bush has ceased its muttering, as the air tightens

like a string. The birds have flown. The koalas are higher

in the trees, hugging the trunks. The roos are heading

for the river. You are filling a hatchback with what they

say are essentials, before being carried to a new reality.

Every snap underfoot feels as if it were ready to ignite.

The only way to continue is to shut off the attachment

to things. Left behind, a kitchen of brands and plastic

wrap, a still-running TV, cupboard doors flung open

with the abandon of a burglar. All the driveways

in the main town are bare. The cars are moving

in the same direction. You keep driving south, discarding

as you go, until all that will be left is you and the thought

of how you came into this world. You are accompanied

yet you’re alone. You are terrified yet move like the wind.

Again, your plan has dropped for another you do not

understand. You are a wallaby with pricked up ears.

You are the fairywren deep in the tree hollow.

You are now at the mercy of all you tried to control –

the sun, the wind, your body, the heat, your heart.

There will be a time, very soon, when the animal

panic will leave your eyes and you will stop

calling out his name. As the sky turns brown

and the earth erupts into the colour of the sun,

you will face what you must; what you couldn’t before –

the ephemeral home, the watershed, your day of rescue.