Fire season

Flame trees are the first to etch the hot

blood of Summer onto a mother mary blue sky.

Their full red flags semaphore

the secret we all know

Terra Nullus will burn again

With minds festooned for Christmas

we hear nothing with our eyes.

Like children, we prefer the pretty decorations

of rosellas and lorikeets bouncing

like party lights in the warm fanning air.

Feather rainbows distract us long after the

Spring rains have faded and we forget that

Terra Nullus will burn again

There is no border between dawn and understanding

At six and five and four a.m

Rounds of song and beak proclaim

in mesmeric repetition

That the trees remain, that the day is certain.

We are hugged by the structure of interpretation.

Like children at the feet of the story teller

we know the sounds of each fiction told

and recite each line like the rise of another perfect day.

There is a comfort in the familiar and we ignore that

Terra Nullus will burn again

Flame trees pulse through the landscape.

Vermillion seduces our senses, configures our heads

We desire those temptations of colour while

magpies swoop in black and white furies of fact.

They are angry harbingers of other philosophies.

They are the other story tellers, focussed on a burning truth.

Like fire, they translate power to their own ends

demanding that we bow before them.

The snap of their swoop ignites in our memories that

Terra Nullus will burn again

Order and chaos simmer on the borders of Spring and Summer,

Red, black and white pollock the pages of each day

colouring comfort into abstraction, speaking our secret.

A magpie, warming itself in the morning's story,

sits in the flame tree and carols at the redblackwhite smoke trail

that is burning into a mother mary blue sky.

Terra Nullus burns again.