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Writer:- Richard Lawrance
New South Wales
LIGHTNING MAN
What is it to live in a big country? I think
my father, pressed into his slingback
armchair, servicing his pokey stove, memories
lodged in every moss-breathed overcoated lumber
to the supermarket crevasse or off-license fissure
of his other side of the world mind; the breaking of ice
on the day, the effort of getting in and out
of tight doorways, driveways, intersections, relationships, air…
Here the expanse can just go for miles
red run with rivulets of parched scrub
like a lung dissected and pegged out across a continent
baked in sun
and we congregate at its edges, bacteria
populating our own version of a life
the land doesn’t share with us. Reticulating smallness
along its waterways, bustling with bits of foreign green,
bricks and mortar, we struggle inwards
then peter out, fortitude’s breath failing
the stuff better off ing the turkey.
We can cross it in cars now – tho’ always a spark plug short
Span it in planes – incubus, aloof
but our pioneers died mostly in the effort
the best we’ve managed really is to
lay off trying to wipe out those who’d learnt to live with it –
and even that only just.
Such grazings by a giant hand,
such artistry, such mighty feet and strides and slides
risings and fallings and writhings and turnings
Lightning Man rustling cumulo-nimbus terror to flush out the Mimi -
who could’ve thought our silly little God, with his
Son on the Cross, his wrath and forgiveness, his heaven
and hell, and his righteous bloody clashes down the European ages
had the grace and majesty to render this.