Underneath the gorse shroud - a lyric essay
The hillsides around our town glow golden in the rising and setting sun. Flowers flooding down slopes The people say the gorse is marching Like an army Like the colonisers they see reflected in gorse's impenetrable thicket. But gorse whispers to me In the quiet misty morning And in her thick and subtle scent As she lines the pathways my friend and I trace Walking our babes to sleep along the riverside And gorse says I follow the damage. Time Colonial humans think in different timelines from the living world Which they inhabit as surface dwellers Landscapes heal in time frames outside our world of five year plans Time for us is something to mark days, weeks. Shaping them into work days and weekends Shaping us into labourers In the demolition of the ecosystems we rely upon Time is something we offer up, A sacrifice for the money god Who endlessly feasts On our days Until they are done Ecosystems do not exist in this colonial kind of time Latin names and laboratory experiments cannot
