Hal G.P. Colebatch: Three Poems

Fragments of Garden Island, WA, as it was

A disturbed penguin

Waddles out of the bottle-dump

And swears at us.

Snakes flee in the acacia, tamar wallabies stare,

Sea-weed bank at night:

A stacked city of glow-worms

Invisible by day.

Oyster-catchers in black and scarlet drift the beach.

A willy-wagtail’s nest

A hand’s breadth past my window

Wafer with tiny eggs.

So near the refinery, the port, the plying ships.

The hot springs bubble

Hardly known, hidden deep away

In thorny castor-oil bushes.

                                        Hal G.P. Colebatch

Carnac Island

There are certainly mermaids here. Whoever

coloured this sun-green bay with its border-castle rocks,

disposed these sea-lions on the gold curves of the beach

and picked out these terns against the sky

did so with mermaids in mind. See

the flash of their tails as they dive where the waves

break over the northern reef. See the starfish

discarded on the sand like ornaments from golden hair,

the jewel-box shells.

And it is here always, waiting

within sight of the refinery chimneys,

the launches, the plying ships.

                                              Hal G.P. Colebatch

Fremantle Oddments

Five minutes away up Anchor Walk,

an amble from the fish-and-chip shop

and the Uniting Church office

and the site of the old Navy Club,

the souvenir shops and the museum

with a rebuilt fragment

of the Batavia’s portentous

blood and heroism-soaked hull,

under a Danish blacksmith’s eye

small boys are queuing up

at a glowing, clanging forge

to hammer out Viking sword-blades.

At the pedestrian mall, the church, flanked

by tattoo-parlour and Tarot-reading shop,

retains a hint of something else.

A small boy sees it and gasps to his parents:

“Look at the King’s castle!”

And, at the deep-water harbour,

the queue is a kilometre long and ten deep,

its people resolute, under the eyes of Marines

and shadowed by looming

gun-barrels greater than tree-trunks,

to climb a ladder up a steel wall

of smooth grey to board a visiting

Iowa-class battleship.

                                              Hal G.P. Colebatch