My local library fills
with knitting voices
connecting threads.
I try to connect in another state:
parallel justice agreements,
feeling, talking song lines.
Viewed sideways.
The interview is taxing,
The referees are interviewed.
The job is mine.
Jail alternatives.
Pack, change states,
Fly above white cloud.
Descend through brown spaces,
Water, rain. Wet season!
The sweating. I walk the tarmac,
Arrive aspirational, old, wise, tired, but
energised, by hope?
There I am in the inner sanctum.
Quiet, a seventies renaissance space
Professional voices.
Clicking computer.
The brilliance mixed with yelling,
“You used my cup.”
“No one touches my mug.”
What mug? Thinking, mug.
Day one. Five ministerial communications,
confidential, consuming, government committed.
Purposeful, forward thinking
For our people, our community.
But there is
something rotten
in the land of the wet season.
Hierarchical. Loud. Write. Written!
Emails, texts, phone calls,
Office people comment;
‘Some just end up
in the Top End.
They don’t fit anywhere else.’
Am I one of those?
Team-leading ladies,
Statisticians,
Long term educators.
Lawyers, policy makers and public servants
Air Force, Navy and Army.
Not much ‘poor fella me’.
The Top End began raw,
Dreaming in the sounds of change.
The Top End waits.
The Top End burns, subjected to hot sun,
The Top End has a heart that
Circles.
That chicken hawk lands.
The media stuck.
Black and white reproaches:
Dreadful young people, dreadful alcoholism,
Again, dreadful crime and again, dreadful crime!
Day 36.
Anger:
‘Aboriginal is spelt with a capital A—
‘Bread’, ‘Butter’ ‘Bread and butter!’
‘You get paid more!’
‘You interviewed well’. ‘You can’t do the job.’
I resign.
Fly to Alice,
Wait. Stop.
The Op Shop,
Indigenous art,
Collecting craftwork.
Day 38.
Home.
Today planting yellow cannas
In the landscape, grey rocky road.
My home.
My little clicking library family.
I can hear little children,
Judy reading out loud:
“There can you see?
On top of the fence over there?
A small house in a wide street.”
Was I a small contribution,
an event?
Top level land
When you reached back, down, water, wet,
As black skinned beautiful people passed down the long road,
No, perhaps just a missed opportunity.
