Dan Guenther: Looking for Uncle Max, Northern Queensland, 2012
Looking for Uncle Max, Northern Queensland, 2012
To the locals he was an oddity
who had served in Papua,
and given to a periodic melancholy
that took him to faraway places
beyond his family’s reach.
You arrived at his remote shack
to hear voices back among the trees,
near an ancient Holden left to decay
under a stand
of fragrant, lemon-scented ironbarks.
Some thought it was a matter of the heart
that brought him north to Queensland,
along with the cousins you had yet to meet,
the ones concealed in the lush undergrowth
who might have answered your many questions.
Up in the shadows among the aromatic leaves
the whine of two cicadas called
for a rendezvous of their kind,
as if wired
to some alien collective mind.
Max stayed hidden, and you waited for a time,
finally turning down the muddy track alone,
a line of waterfowl passing by high overhead,
on their way toward distant ranging hills
not unlike those found
along the Kokoda Trail.
Dan Guenther
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