Judith Wright was born into a prominent pastoral family in Armidalc, New South Wales, in 1915. Since her first collection of poems (The Moving Image, 1946), Wright's wide range of verse and prose writings has reflected her increasing interest in the landscape, conservation issues, and the civil and territorial rights of indigenous Australians. The works referred to in the essay following this selection of poems (with abbreviations used given in brackets after the full title) include: Preoccupations in Australian Toetry (Preoccupations), 196S; Because I Was Invited, 1975; Phantom Dwelling, 1985; and A Human Pattern (IIP), 1990. A full list of Judith Wright's published works appears in the Select Bibliography. 2. 3RIDOINGS JUDITH WRIGHT $ For New England Your trees, the homesick and the swarthy native, blow all one wav to- me, this southern weather that smells of early snow And I remember the house closed in with sycamore and chestnut fighting the foreign wind. Here 1 will stay, she said; be done with the black north, die harsh horizon rimmed with drought— planted die island there and drew it round her. Therefore 1 find in me die double tree. And therefore I, deserted on the wharves, have watched the ships fan out dieir web of streamers (thinking of how die lookout at die Heads leaned out towards the dubious rims of sea to find a sail blown over like a message: you are not jorgotten) \ or followed through die tap-root of die poplar . . . But look, oh look, the Godiic tree's on fire with blown galalis, and fuming with wild wings. The hard inquiring wind strikes to die bone and whines division. Many roads meet here in me, the traveller and the ways I travel. All the hills' gathered waters feed my seas who am the swimmer and the mountain river; and die long slopes' concurrence is my flesh who am die gazer and die land 1 stare on; and dogwood blooms within my winter blood, and orchards fruit in me and need no season. But sullenly the jealous bones recall what odier earth is shaped and hoarded in diem. Where's home, Ulysses? Cuckolded by lewd time he never found again the girl he sailed from, but at his fireside met die islands waiting, and died diere, twice a stranger. Wind, blow through me, till die nostalgic candles of laburnum fuse widi the dogwood in a single flame to touch alight these sapless memories. Then will my land turn sweetly from the plough and all my pastures rise as green as spring. Nigger's Leap: New England The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun. Night runs an obscure tide round cape and bay and beats widi boats of cloud up from die sea against this sheer and limelit granite head. Swallow the spine of range; be dark, O lonely air. Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull that screamed falling in flesh from die lipped cliff and then were silent, waiting for the flies. Here is the symbol, and the climbing dark a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning over the rocks diat wait our keels; no bells sound for her mariners. Now must we measure our days by nights, our tropics by dieir poles, love by its end and all our speech bv silence. See, in these gulfs, how small the light of home. Did wc not know their blood channelled our rivers, and the black dust our crops ate was their dust? O all men are one man at last. We should have known die night diat tided up the cliffs and hid them had the same question on its tongue for us. And there they lie that were ourselves writ small. Never from earth again the coolamon, or thin black children dancing like the shadows of saplings in die wind. Night lips the harsh scarp of the tableland and cools its granite. Night floods us suddcidy as history, that has sunk many islands in its good time. Train Journey Glassed widi cold sleep and dazzled by die moon, out of the confused hammering dark of the train T looked and saw under the moon's cold sheet your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart; and the small trees on their micoloured slope like poetry moved, articulate and sharp and puiposeful under the great dry flight of air, under die crosswise currents of wind and star. Clench down your strengdi, box-tree and ironbark. Break widi your violent root die virgin rock. Draw from the flying dark its breath of dew till the unliving come to life in you. Be over the blind rock a skin of sense, under the barren height a slender dance . . . I woke and saw the dark small trees that burn suddenly into flowers more lovely dian die white moon, Australia 197 0 Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk, dangerous till the last breath's gone, clawing and striking. Die cursing your captor through a raging eye. Die like the tigersnake that hisses such pure hatred from its pain as fills die killer's dreams with fear like suicide's invading stain. Suffer, wild country, like die ironwood that gaps the dozer-blade. I see your living soil ebb with the tree to naked poverty. Die like the soldier-ant mindless and faithful to your million years. Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind, stay obstinate; stay blind. For we are conquerors and self-poisoners more than scorpion or snake and dying of the venoms diat we make even while you die of us. I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust, the drying creek, die furious animal, that they oppose us still; that we are ruined by the thing we kill. Two Drfamtimfs (For Keith Walker, now Oodgeroo Noonuccal) Kadry my sister with die lorn heart, T don't know how to thank you for your dreamtime stories of joy and grief written on paperbark, You were one of the dark children I wasn't allowed to play widi— riverbank campers, the wrong colour (I couldn't turn you white.) So it was late i met you, late i began to know they hadn't Lold me die land 1 loved was taken out of your hands. Sitting all night at my kitchen table with a cry and a song in your voice, your eyes were full of the dying children, the blank-eyed taken women, die sullen looks of die men who sold diem for rum to forget die selling; the hard rational white faces with eyes that forget the past. With a knifeblade flash in your black eyes dial always long to be blacker, your Spanish-Koori face of a fighter and singer, aims over your breast folding your sorrow in to hold it, you brought me to you some of the way and came the rest to meet me; over the desert of red sand came from your lost country to where i stand with all my fathers, their guilt and righteousness. Over the rum your voice sang the tales of an old people, dieir dreaming buried, die place forgotten . . We too have lost our dreaming. We the robbers, robbed in turn, selling this land on hire-purchase; what's stolen once is stolen again even before we know it. If we are sisters, it's in diis— our grief for a lost country, the place wc dreamed in long ago, poisoned now and crumbling. Let us go back to that far time, I riding the cleared hills, plucking blue leaves for their cucalypt scent, hearing the call of the plover, in a land I thought was mine for life, T mourn it as you mourn the ripped length of the island beaches, die drained paperbark swamps. The easy Lden-drcamrime then in a country of birds and trees made me your shadow-sister, child, dark girl I couldn't play with. But we are grown to a changed world; over the drinks at night we can exchange our separate griefs, but yours and mine are different. A knife's between us. My righteous kin still have cruel faces. Neither you nor I can win them, though we meet in secret kindness. I am born of the conquerors, you of the persecuted. Raped by rum and an alien law, progress and economics, are you and I and a once-loved land peopled by tribes and trees; doomed by traders and stock-exchanges, bought by faceless strangers. And you and I are bought and sold, our songs and stories loo, though quoted low in a falling market (publishers shake, their heads at poets). Time dial we shared for a little while, telling sad tales of women (black or white at a different price) meant much and little to us. My sfiadow-sisler, I sing to vou from my place with my righteous kin, to where you stand with the Koori dead, 'Trust none—not even poets'. The knife's between us. 1 turn it round, the handle to your side, die weapon made from your country's bones. I have no right to take it. But both of us die as our dreamtime dies, I don't know what to give you for your gay stories, your sad eyes, but that, and a poem, sister. Falls Country (For Feter Skryznecki) I had an aunt and an uncle brought up on the Hastern Fall. They spoke the tongue of Lhc falls-countr sidelong, reluctant as leaves. Trees were dieir droughts: peppermint gum, black-sally white tea-tree hung over creeks. rustic of bracken. They spoke evasively, listened to evident silence, ran out on people. She hid in her paintings, clothed, clouded in leaves; and her piano scattered glittering notes of leaves in sunlight, ; drummed with winter rains, opened green depdis like gullies. i He took better to horses: the galloping storms of hoofs ■ like eucalypts chattering or stones hopping on slopes. Enclosed in die dust of mobs or swinging and propping among those, ribbony boles % he was happy. * I lis eves were as wary *: as soft as a kangaroos. I Snow falling, die soft drizzle ? of easterly weadier covers them, my old darlings. I c What does die earth say? | Notlling sharp-edged. I Its gossip of lichen and leaf, I its age-curved granites, 1 its glitter of wetness $ enclose diem. Is the spring coming? Are there hooded orchids? That's what their bones breed under the talk of magpies. Listen. Listen, latecomer to my country, sharer in what I know, eater of wild manna. There is Hi ere was a country that spoke in the language of leaves. Snakeskin on a Gate Summer's long heats slowing at January's end I found by the gate a snake-slough; its drv scales of horn blew newly-cast in the hot wind against the hedge, ripped between stem and thorn. I took it, shivering, and hung it on the gate-rails— thinking it emblem, if emblems had been needed, of a time of life like January, double-faced month of change, diat looking backward sighs for the dedication's innocence, dien turns too many pages, to find die end of die book. But its touch was closer than omens: dry, cold, strange. Dry with life withdrawn; cold with a desert cold; strange, between two realities, neither alive nor decayed, the snakeskin blew in the wind on die closed gate; and I went uneasily, watching, for my life's sake, for a coil of poisonous dark in the pools of shade. Then at last I saw him, stretching warm in the sun; shining; his patterned length clean as a cut jewel. Set free of its dim shell, his glinting eye saw only movement and light and had no fear of me. Like this from our change, mv soul, let us drink renewal. Space Between Space between lip and lip and space between living and long-deal flesh can sometimes seem the same. We strive across, we strain to those who breathe the air, to those in memory; but Here is never There. What is the space between, enclosing us in one united person, yet dividing each alone? Frail bridges cross from eye to eve, from flesh to flesh, from word to world; die net is gapped at every mesh; and this each human knows: however close our touch or intimate our speech, silences, spaces reach most deep, and will not close. Half-dream Half dreaming half awake I felt die old boat rock at the lake shore; small pulse of waves in the moon-road slop, lip, withdraw; pull and slack of die rope. sigh in the trees. Old boat nibbles her rope, swings; black swan stirs asleep. Rise, fall of breath, hesitant regular beat, Tug on the wearing strand all night long sidling, slackening. a peaceful dream. No sound but leaf-talk, lip on sand, shift of swan-wing. Half-awake my heart tested its moorings, turned back to sleep. Let the breath rise and fall, the regular ripple and slack fray at the strand. Black/White This time I shall recover from my brief blowtorch fever. The sweats of living flood mc; I wake again pondering the moves of anti and of pro. Back into play 1 go. Had it been pro-biotics that they gave me would I still live? Antibiotics maybe snub the truth, cheating the black king's move— emptily save me, a counter-ghost tricked from a rightful death. But you can play on black squares or on white, do without counters even; in theory even the dead still influence what we do, direct our strategy. I'm none too sure exactly why I'm here, which side I'm playing for— but still, here's day, here's night, the checkerboard of yes and no and take and give. Again i meet you face to face, which in itself is unexpected grace. To arms, my waiting opposite— we live. Woman to Man The eyeless labourer in the night, the selfless, shapeless seed T hold, builds for its resurrertion day— silent and swift and deep from sight foresees the unimagined light. This is no child with a child's face; this has no name to name it by; yet you and I have known it well. This is our hunter and our chase, the third who lay in our embrace. This is the strength that your arm knows, the. arc of flesh that is my breast, the precise crystals of our eyes. This is the blood's wild tree that grows the intricate and folded rose. This is the maker and the made; this is the question and reply; the blind head butting at the dark, the blaze of light along the blade. Oh hold me, for i am afraid. GUM-TREts Stripping Say the need's born within the tree, and waits a trigger set for light; say sap is tidal like the sea and rises with the solstice-heat— but wisdom shells the words away to watch diis fountain slowed in air where sun joins eardi—to watch the place at which these, silent rituals are. ; Words are not meanings for a tree. So it is truer not to say 'These rags look like humility, or this year's wreck of last year's love, or wounds ripped by the summer's claw.' If it is possible to be wise here, wisdom lies outside the word in the earlier answer of the eyes. Wisdom can see, the red, the rose, the stained and sculptured curve of grey, t the charcoal scars of fire, and see s around that living tower of tree , the hermit tatters of old bark split down and strip to end the season; ; and can be quiet and not look ■!■ for reasons past the edge of reason. Dark Gift i The flower begins in die dark ? where life is not. Death has a word to speak i and the flower begins. | How small, how closely bound i l . , i m nothing s net J the word waits in the ground I for the cloak earth spins.