Stephen Gilfedder: Six Poems

Allie Riding Mr Gentle

My daughter on the black horse
shouting watch me against a landscape
with no distractions has me thinking
of another variation on the archetypal
parent theme: if only
your great-grandmother could see you now.
Fordie, the teenage jillaroo and cook
in Wild West Gippsland, rode

from Carrajung to Fish Creek in a day.
Caught in an electrical downpour,
sheltering in the cattlemen’s wattle and daub
with the rammed earth floor and chooks
cooped up inside against the foxes.
Mustering, snapping out the stockwhip
like a goanna’s tongue before the dismissive
stationhands, aureoled by her pride

and joy red hair, later scythed
with crutching shears when a bat
flew in her room curtained by a tarp
in the shearers’ quarters and got entangled.
Giggling If I was a horse, they’d shoot me
in the Base Hospital, not recognising me
but speaking to my presence as a boy.
She died light as the light-as-a-feather

cream puffs she’d bake in the speckled range
from dawn,…