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.