The Meadow

She walks down the back

past the clothesline

behind the large shed.

A strange adjunct of garden

they didn’t even realise was theirs

when they bought the little rundown house.

Not much here, twisted pear trees,

the children’s swing, a water tank, almost empty now.

In spring the boneseed

strips skin

from the palms of her hand.

The boy from two doors down

cuts the lawns. In the street

when he sees her he waves

whether alone

or with a friend.

It’s early morning,

midsummer.

Long hot night,

cool change

finally creeping in after the dawn.

She aches all over from badly sleeping.

When she slept

her husband in a violent dream

shook her awake, asking for the children.

Oh the light is lovely now and the breeze

across the dry grasses.

A peep-wren flickers in the paperbark tree.

Here in the far corner of the yard

she sees something half child.

It appears to be building a nest.

It reminds her sharply of

her first born, knotted hair, narrow bones,

but this thing is smaller,

though not small as to be delightful.

(Perhaps knee height?)

It smells like shredded wheat, like dead grass,

like years of drought.

It is a thing more strange than she has ever seen

stranger than the second daughter

born in the caul,

stranger than the third child,

born a boy.

She has seen it and

doesn’t want to have seen it.

She turns away, embarrassed by the miracle,

walks back to the clothesline and begins to briskly unpeg.

From the corner of her eye

she watches it

slither

between the wires of the fence and into

next door’s garden.

She carries the clothes to the house.

Curiosity draws her back in the late afternoon.

It wasn’t a nest at all,

nothing so intricate.

Just a clumsy star of sticks,

like a child’s game

of laying a fire.

She walks back to the house,

twigs snapping underfoot.

Everything is so dry.