This weekend I performed a marriage ceremony on the Bay at Port Melbourne and was invited for the lunch party. I sat with friends and whiled away the afternoon eating oysters and scallops, followed by beef tenderloin and a late afternoon meringue with cream. No mention was made of politics or climate at our table all that afternoon. In contrast at a poetry reading on Saturday, Harry Laing described a period of obsession with climate change saying he’d been quite un-liveable with. The poems he made of that time are in his latest collection ‘Backbone’ and this one evokes marriage:
estranged
it seems the marriage of water and earth
has come apart
I take it personally
like a child
punishing the dirt with my boot
and the rain that was printed inside me
like a parent’s voice I never thought
water and earth would part company
look at these pictures call them bones
the bridal rush of water
down a honeymoon creek
see how flushed the earth looks
back then
inseparable they were
flooding because they loved each other
what’s to stop them getting back together
I ask over and over
Harry Laing