A Helicopter View of Terrestrial Stars

Turn slowly in fields
And there is a star all around you.
Even out in wide country, the bush gone back miles,
In the angle of paddock and fence-line, the embayments of light
It is the old star of settlement
That will dilate, or contract perhaps, in your time.
Back just at the edge of memory, it was not there.

And rising up
In our forward posture
Under a palm-tree of blades above stelliform cities
Memory is strengthened regarding the human task, seeing
Asia below,
The river-plains thronged with the tenant constellations
That fall back from gravel, from height
Like Saxons from heather
Till each middle kingdom appears in the light of cleared space
A tissue worthy of language,
A pulse among stems.

Beside some of these
The shield of David is young.
Only the hunters' frail meteor descends
From more ancient darkness. It may flicker out in our life.
The star of work will go nova, maybe. But not cold
For it is time
And every true human clearing is where time began
And has been kept open.

Dead effort, lost bricks,
A child's plate of sand,
The nimbus of rose-briars ghostly in green brush
Going back to five petals
Nowhere is far from that.
Against this, the seasons were hacked, with unending spadework
From the wild, their dim house, for people beyond them in streets,
That is, for a lady
At the tender core of a space kept open with iron
She need not ever acknowledge with her mouth.
In the dark of refinement
Her blood must encompass the Sun.

And these are the stars for our journey in this revelation,
The galaxy earth we have built.
In every azimuth we are thinking of our country,
Oh, not the triple-cross canton, that tick-gate of caste
On the Shareholder Plains
We think of the lonely stars of our consent
To what is done far down in smoking fields
And rotors and engine
Throb too loud for speech.

Vietnam, Viet Nam,
Green ladder of the ruthless,
What classes scale your struts of print and flesh.
It is very low down,
Perhaps not crop-high now beneath the chopper-blades
That the rays of effort keep their ancient core.
Flames swivel from food
As the abstractions hit.
Among the impact-shapes, pit here, corpse there,
The scar of a house looks strangely well-positioned,
Its faint, unhurried reasons
Surrounding it still.

By the tailed rockets' crux and criss-cross
Who will be enemy in the crowded man's war?
The last creatures? The hills?
Soldiers and earthmovers here are so hugely equipped.
Our hovering metal containment
Is steadily pierced.
What we contain, we brought. It is loose in the world.
Discharged through us
It flows back redoubled
Into our country that wanted to doze until greatness.

And sent to buy safety
From the conjured wind
We are dismissed from the stars of long contemplation
To fight in a running-dog war
Or a running-dog peace,
Two aerolites that wake no cattle-duffers
(What grass indeed would those fellows hope to reach
In an Iroquois' belly?)

It saps the mind's tree
It dulls the iron roofs' candour
And the emulous spirit who wants these forgotten rejoices,
Crying abroad A third of all fields must be struck
By the star called politics
And such longed-for estoiles of terror
As light the unloved—

But didn't the fly's child at stool in the peasant's slashed throat
Say power is madness?

South, south in our conquered home island
Turn slowly in fields
And there is a star all around you.
Only on featureless plain or flat-calm sea
Are you always mid-point.

There wind the furrows' old Gaelic
And smoke in cleared days.
You can never be whole there again, having entered Time's spiral
It's so often proclaimed
But what have we loved better since?
Timekeeping, perhaps? Our scab of dependence the Crown?
The zodiac money?

Look from Kurnell. The houses
Are aching with tedious light.
Hard to say whether the subtle sky-rim of our tenure
Or the home-paddock heart is more unexplored,
Which faith more benumbed in memory
Or cluttered with lines.

Is it too harsh to hope this hamburger consummation,
This speeded-up print of our riches
May drive some to faith,
To thinking of futures that have concurrence of trees?

To look, with some failure of reticence, on into home country
Where Heaven lasts for a month and Tasmanian saints
Welcome sheepish white troopers,
Where the dogger runs barefoot through the whole fire-season
To dance with storekeepers' children and long-legged cranes,
And the lady is honoured young
At last, and the holy ground
And every man as finely employed as a species.