Landing Party

We are a handful, just a boatful, carrying too many skies

between us. Folded skies packed neatly in trunks—not

this endlessness above; not this stretching into the void,

upside down. At night, the sky is cut through with holes

moth-eaten and starry. Not to be stashed away. And now

we’re washed up on the edge of the world. Landing party

on the moon—the sun, heavy in our clothes, drying them

stiff against us, like we’re cut-outs of our former selves.

As if we could cross the shoreline and the sand would

cradle us. Wash us clean. Take our skies and names and

wounds of home. Rowing ashore, the sky high and knowing

there is smoke in the trees and old smoke in our clothes

and we utter not a word between us because what is there

to say when the trees look so strange, and the moon hangs

on a hinge, as it never has before.

Published First Wave: Exploring Early Coastal Contact History in Australia (Wakefield Press, 2019) edited by Gillian Dooley & Danielle Clode