TODAY'S NEWS

Where will we go after the rain?

Will we have strength enough to remain

Here on a grisly shore that pulses with pain

As storm surf spits waste on a plagued coastal plain?

Where will we go after the drought?

Will we again know what trust was about?

Can we ever rebuild the faith we outgrew;

Or will we be refilled by pride in our virtue?

Another war rages across bleeding stages

Described in pages copied from dark ages.

The rich count money bequeathed in belief

Support can be bought and funded by grief.

Useful idiots holler so loudly that all must hear;

But no one listens and fewer understand.

Profanity so grand emits visions and glistens;

But no one sees and fewer perceive.

MY LA NIÑA SUMMER

The sky is always grey,

Pallid, like ashes.

It’s just another day

Of this, my La Niña summer.

And the rain on the roof

Patters, it seems, as chary proof

Of an untested chapter of truth.

No one really cares

About faraway floods

And their remote victims —

They are, they say, mere symptoms.

And, yet, I could relish the rain —
The sumptuous sound of it

On my corrugated canopy;

But, I cannot.

For my life is a despised irrelevance.

So I can only lament

The demise of my culture

And the desert of hostility

That burgeons all around me

In this, my La Niña summer.

The photograph of the 1961 Hawkesbury flood
is part of the Riverstone Historical Society's collection.