What Lies Beneath

The dead angophora slowly scatters its bark

like a burns patient shedding her bandages, the bald

wood redolent of charred, oozing skin. Cool air kisses

the sandstone ledge and whispers of the long gone sea.

There is not enough fairness in this world. Some houses

are miraculously spared, others flattened by a firestorm

sweeping through the long paddocks, the hamlet, the valley.

Hard to look at such wholesale carnage and not cry.

Hard to believe the grafts will take, that the house

will rise again, high on its blackened stumps. This

is a place where people have always had to start

from scratch, crawling forward on blistered knees, skin

stretched tight enough to cover a snare drum, hands now

applauding new skin that is itchy, mottled and alive.