Margaret Bradstock: Three Poems

Sea Dog

 

Out on the Harbour

in the wooden yacht without a sail

Heathcliff, the little black dog

in his flotation-jacket, balances

on the prow, John-Howard eyebrows scan

the horizon like sensors, nose uplifted, snuffing

the breeze, a captain searching for landfall.

You’d almost expect to hand him a telescope.

 

We anchor offshore from a sandy bay—

the water’s fine, and passing monoliths

wave a greeting, foreshores as thickly wooded

as a Glover painting, except for Darling Harbour.

Take your last look at Barangaroo, before

the casino’s phallic projection, burgeoning

in metal, marks another dispossession,

high-rollers blowing smoke-screens.

Every dog has his day, so they say.

Margaret Bradstock

 

Forty-one degrees

Almost summer, season of hot dry winds.

Cooling off in Clovelly Bay, among

sea-urchins and blue gropers, you enter

                   a floating world, easy to forget

out there it’s another heatwave.

Outside my townhouse, men with hats

and overheated brains are repairing

     the roof, damaged in last April’s storms,

still leaking water.

The garden needs watering. While rock-plants

and veldt daisies may survive

                      into our future desert, magnolias

bloom fast and quickly die, browned flowers

               drifting onto unswept tiles. At dusk

the air’s still warm, black cockatoos have fled

with raucous cry, back to their cooler forests.

In a neighbouring pond, frogs belt out

          loud mating-songs, secure for now, until

developers arrive, to move the earth.

Out there, it’s also a war on terror

as jihadists and extremists take control

and suddenly we know

                   how, at any given moment,

in a train carriage in London, a music festival

in Paris, or a Lindt cafe somewhere

    life can be snatched away.

Même pas mal, say the French, in solidarity,

“Not even hurt.” But we all are.

In this hot, shifting darkness

                  I wish the rains would come.

Margaret Bradstock

Beyond Head of Bight

Matthew Flinders charted this coast

stunned by its loveliness.

Unending Bunda cliffs, towering over a vast

unspoiled ocean, iconic curve the longest line

of sea-cliffs in the world; a nursery for

sea lion colonies to raise their pups,

seasonal home of the southern right whales

great white sharks, humpbacks, bluefish tuna

white-bellied sea eagle, and albatross.

What’s not to save?

 

The ocean’s a rich field for profiteers,

for oil and gas, offshore drilling,

underwater blasts of seismic exploration.

Remember the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

(2010 Deepwater Horizon), oil pouring

into the sea for eighty-seven days?

 

Seasonal upwelling of deep ocean waters

along the coast brings nutrients to the surface,

fertility, making it a hotspot.

Southern right whales come here to Head of Bight

from summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic

to calve and breed, not feeding until their return.

Spy hopping, deep diving, the calves now schooled

in life skills, from a distance they look

like upturned hulls, a constant loop of broad gun-metal

backs, their sheen a light across oceans.

Margaret Bradstock