Give Me Alice Springs

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.