Drought, 1967
Mother, you and I walk across
the bladeless paddock, kicking dust
Oh, it breaks my heart so, you say–
a sentence exhaled with sadness
Only now, do I really feel what
you said and how you said it.
I’m now a little older than you were
when dust and sighing mixed with
those words. It is thirty years and drought
is here again. There is something about
the air, the layering of dust, the loss
of grass, the particular sway of old
eucalypt branches and their browning
eaves. I feel my chest fill to breaking
I’d like to ask if you too think it’s worse
this time–How long for recovery?
Every grief is simply layered
on top of the last. And the last.
Does the earth feel that way too?
How many griefs must we ply and
plough? How many layers before
the sadness breaks the earth’s heart?
I have recently revisted this poem (written in 2008) because I have been thinking a lot about grief for the planet. Seeing the fires roar through California reminds me of drought and of the fires that devastated Australia from September 2019 through to March 2020. This is climate catastrophe.
In the prehistory era, while there would be fires and environmental catastrophes, they were not human made because in that time people living in gynocantric communities worked with nature.
This poem is from Unsettling the Land by Suzanne Bellamy and Susan Hawthorne. I write about the subject of grief and climate catstrophe in my forthcoming book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy which will be published simultaneously around the world in November 2020.
Re Susan Hawthorne: such a beautiful poem and one that I am presently living – drought is a horrible thing to witness – I think Earth will survive but her dying plants and animals will not and this is the grief that is so hard to bare…