Grga Pitic: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Nambawan!

Hiking On Flinders Island

Even hiking is done through time,
that fourth dimension that hoods our view.
You will not meet the shy Flinders Island platypus,
a species dead before truly known.
Its gene-pools in two or three creeks
made a meal for the last Tasmanian tribes
brought here to die. The coast line stays,
a vast mastodon that tramps trough time
to turn up a half-century later much the same
though the mahouts and passengers change.

Beneath the Blue Mountains Cook found pasture
' for more flocks and herds than can ever be brought'
- forty years later the cattle were starving.
Native cats ravaged the hen-roosts: a virus bit
and they were gone. Only here on Flinders
the daytime-feeding wombat lives;
a thing that will neither fight nor run.
I am watching one now, in all four dimensions,
nibbling, half asleep, like a stocky sheep
in the morning sun.

  Mark O'Connor Dec 8, 2013 8:36 AM