As of today, my family and I have been a year in Alice
Springs, Australia. There are so many things I could say about this time so
far. I could tell about the growth my kids have experienced, the walks through
the bush behind our neighborhood, the different things I’ve noticed about life
while living out of the US for my first time. So many things.
But in the end, what I did recently was write a poem, which
is very much not my medium. I started it out as a kind of essay about my experience
of the natural world here and how life here has forced me to change, but it
didn’t feel right and it wasn’t working. So I condensed and altered, and this
is what is left. It’s not complete. I actually kind of hate the idea of sharing it because it feels both too personal and not personal enough. Plus, it is poetry, which—I cannot stress this enough—is not my thing. But I’m trying to be brave.
It doesn’t take into account a lot of the
joys and wonder. It doesn’t tell you about the months when I thought, “I will
never step out into cool weather and no flies again; I will never be cold again,”
and then suddenly, within about a week, all the jumpers and long sleeves and
jeans came out again and I remembered that there was cold in the world.
It doesn’t tell you about the hike we took one day that led
us past a strange combination of objects—old tin cans, a whole lot of golf
balls, little paddymelons, and a kangaroo carcass that had probably become food
for dingoes or at least kites. How what might have been disgusting was merely
fascinating—a part of the natural world, a part of real life. How we examined
its bones and remains, appreciating a kangaroo’s incredible structure and
adaptations for the life it leads.
This poem doesn’t explicitly mention that this experience is
so very specific to my life, here, as a white woman transplanted into a world I
have never lived in before. It doesn’t discuss what it would be like to
actually live off this land, and it only skims the surface of some of the
beauty here. It also only skims the surface of how I have changed in the last
year—both so much and so little at the same time. And how there’s still so much
to learn. So it feels so incomplete in some ways, but hopefully it captures at
least a moment or a feeling or just a tiny bit of what life has been here for
me.
And so, without further ado (because that was definitely plenty
of ado already!):
“Give Me Alice Springs”
Some
people love
the
lush, bright greens,
the
wet humidity,
of
lands where rain is plentiful and gardens grow
a
rainbow of color
even
in neglect.
I
have loved them too.
But
for me, for now,
give
me the granite, the gneiss,
the red
rock rising in ridges and crags,
the
dust and dirt,
the
sand that stains every white
a
perpetual pale rust.
Give
me the greens of the desert,
a
thousand shades of muted sage.
The restrained
reds and softened yellows
in
the grevillea, the bottlebrush, the wattle—
flowers
that know
how
to grow in drought.
Give
me a land
stripped
down.
Give
me the sturdy strength that survives—
flourishes—
in
the searing of a too-close sun.
Give
me the sky as wide as eternity,
as sharp
as certainty.
Let
me search,
work,
dig
deep to find
infinitesimal
treasures
buried
in the rubble
of
broken rock and hard-packed earth.
And
then,
after
I’ve gathered piles of pebbles,
let
me spend a day in the sun,
trickles
of mud pouring down my arm
as I
hold a sieve full of hope
to
the sunlight,
seeking
the tell-tale glint
of
garnet red.
Here
I have been forced to strip away
what
would not grow.
Felt
weak things wither painfully.
Felt
myself held up to the
scorching
sunlight,
searched
desperately for value that came
not
from trappings or titles or tasks
but
from me—
the
garnets of who I am among the dross
of
what I thought I was meant to be.
Here,
when
the rain comes,
it
must come for days,
for
weeks,
before
the river flows.
When
it flows, the land wakes.
We
flow to the water as the water flows into the land,
we
come to splash
and
wade
and
expand.
The
night silence is broken
by
the croaking of frogs,
singing
their mating songs, celebrating new life,
then
burrowing and laying their eggs
once
again
as the
river shrinks and disappears.
The
eggs will hatch
when
the next rain comes.
Someday
I will return to a land
of brilliant
greens,
a
land where I must ever work to weed
what
is not wanted,
not
carefully cultivate
what
I wish to keep.
But
for now, I am content
to
be refined in the heat of this sun,
to
let my chaff blow away in the searing desert wind,
to
soak and splash in the water that heals, that makes everything live where it
goes.
For
now, I am content in Alice Springs.
