Life Beneath

Berrin (Mt Gambier), Boandik Country

Under the city, a tour guide who,
if not secluded away in regional Australia, should
have starred in Werner Herzog films, recounts

the myriad ways that this
porous calcified roof above us could,
for all we know, tumble down on our heads,

being, as he delights to tell us,
essentially “nothing”, just air, like clouds,
like ourselves.

Underground rivers, flowing from raindrops,
filtered through limestone over aeons, finally
gushing out of this chalky coast

to the Southern Ocean as though
longing for the frozen continent rent
from its side. We too are porous.

So is our past to 
the Boandik, recalling
Ancient cataclysm, as though it happens

every day, and it does. Ground that was
certain for millennia, carved
into parcels for this governor and that.

Rifts open. Land is pulled away from home.
Home moves.
“Over there,” he points.

“See those two set-squares?”
Perpendicular like
a cross, they mark

where the rock now stands, the slightest
change in which could make
the city above us plunge.

“If the cross stands,” he declares, “we’re alright.”
And the Creator, father of flesh and volcanoes, nods, says,
Yes. But not as you imagine.

You can listen to a conversation about this poem on the Reformed Journal Podcast.