Ash in Sydney - by Jake Goetz

 ISLAND | ISSUE 159

After August Kleinzahler’s ‘Snow in Jersey’

ash is falling on the Lidcombe line
on Carriageworks and Regents Park
it’s falling on closed-up houses
where Greg thinks his summer’s fucked
and it’s blowing in from morning westerlies
and it’s blown back by arvo southerlies
and it’s falling as if the sky were a chimney
and the country a crematory, animals of ash
falling through bodies, the lyrebird’s song
an office worker’s cough as they jog through
the Domain at lunch, and it’s falling on woke
capital city greenies marching at Town Hall
and on National MPs whose towns are out of water
and it’s falling on Raquel who sits at Coogee
on a working holiday from Brazil, watching
it wash ashore with the breakers, and it’s falling
on New Zealand glaciers, over Chile and Argentina
circling the earth to return to Australia
and it’s falling on screens and the space they sit
between, falling on the dissociative gleam of our media
and it’s falling like the ASX on Kochie and Samantha
falling like coal-dust from the hands of Scomo
and his dreams of a surplus, falling on his Hawaiian
holiday and PR stunts, falling into dams and rivers
clogging the country’s veins, falling into stolen land
and white National Parks, ash is falling, falling
as relentless as snow, as if snow could fall
from the ground up ▼

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This poem appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.

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