A Shattered Dream

by tfawcus

Here, on the whale’s back, a hump of hills
lies stretched along the coast, where Vulcan force
once shaped the writhing, molten land, now still
revered by generations past who dream
on Ngarrindjeri* bones, ancestral songs
aligned with fractured seams, where they belong,

and here, each wintertime, the whales return,
slap-wallow tails and spurt their crystal spume,
to birth and tend the young leviathan
in shallow bays, but early settlers preyed
on them to fuel a want for light and hope
of scent and female corsetry – and soap

to wash away their sin. Thus the white men came
and, drenched in blood, they cut their homes from hills
along the coast, in savagery, and claimed
the stranded Dreamtime whale and made it yield
its fractured flesh to build their homes of stone,
embedding rights to call this land their own.

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Ngarrindjeri, pronounced something like 'garrenjerry', are the Aboriginal people of the lower Murray River, western Fleurieu Peninsula, and the Coorong of southern, central Australia.

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A Shattered Dream

by tfawcus

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