My mother in astral flight
My mother is sitting in a room somewhere,
her palms held together in front of her heart.
In her mind she crosses the Victorian border,
travelling back home to the south.
To see her mother before she dies.
To resurface the past life
she cast aside
40 years before.
Woman of red earth
Woman of salt lake
Who fled to the mountains at twenty-three,
who slept on the stones,
who drank from the streams.
Who entered a mud hut
with a basket of flowers.
Who gave birth on a hillside
kneeling in the dew
on the shortest day,
through the longest night.
Who cried for her mother to console her,
who wrapped her first born in the river reeds.
White like the peaks,
wet like her cheeks.
Warm like the blood on her child,
red like the soil of her homeland.
Who came down from the mountains
child in her arms,
who moved from town to town,
a wandering fog.
Who bore a name that wasn't hers
in a city of strangers
uncradled by mountain or ocean.
Whose body ached under skeleton sky,
who wept for the earth to receive her.
Who felt her father's ghost like recurring birdsong
still living in the body's hollows.
Who heard her mother's voice like a bubble of salt water
crawling from her inner ear back to the border.
She sits now, silent, in a room somewhere,
her palms held together in front of her heart.
Like a seashell encircling her own form,
returning to the centre,
tracing her journey back to the site of creation.
Hurrying now in astral flight,
through the skin of the river,
through the mirror of the sky,
past her mind's salt line.
Through the fault lines of her memory
to the event horizon,
to the desert plateau,
where her mother lays dying on a bed of wildflowers.
Woman of red earth
Woman of salt lake
Who lost her daughter at the border
40 years before.