Sympathy in Silver City

1

Broken Hill’s roads were wide,

way too wide for walking on—

dark molten rivers of asphalt

in Australia’s petroleum emptiness.

Fact is, they were chemical flats:

Oxide, Iodide, Bromide (ours)

and the Trades Hall on Blende.

Doors opened for us everywhere.

A sense of space came inside.

At night we studied the electrostatics

of lightning striking upwards,

and taking half the ground with it.

2

Streets away from the Sydney road

you could feel the telluric reverberations

of a hundred-ton trucking concept.

The earth was moving, and not necessarily for us.

Once in a blue moon, at the South Mine,

there would be a controlled underground explosion,

another attempt to shift the planet from its axis

before we woke in the morning.

3

Behind the Indian Pacific railway and Mario’s Palace

the mullock hill of evacuated tailings had become a landmark.

Hundreds of man-years mantled with lichen.

Iain Bamforth