BY JAKOB RYCE
When you migrated to the south, beating your mouth in pitches, you claimed your wealth would bring prosperity for all. When you developed a taste for acquisitions, possessions, revisions, and cut the strings that tethered you to the fruitless land, the scorched land of willow and bark; far from the docks lined with mosquito fossils and the ceaseless choir of fowls. When you renounced the scrub and forest, pine and possum. When you stood up tall against the redwood that loomed over the entire wildwood bastille, said no more, and rallied strangers to bring axes and saws, their children to light spot-fires in the tall grass and burn anything that was not dead. When you rose early to raise steel towers against the flattened granite sky and showed them how to wield combustion. When you grew bored of the mountain’s secrets and cracks appeared in your eyes, you stirred up the muddy waters of want and of what was lost. When you chased the morning down with amber and strolled steaming into the yellow fields, striking down whomever crossed your path. When you mistook the dark women for wives and drove their children away; for all their talk of the seven mothers and magnetic horses and living things that should never touch the skin. When your neighbors spoke of consequences you still boiled with visions of land – land rich with blood, ancestors unbeknownst to you; oppressed in dreams, oppressed in visions, oppressed in earth; appearing in your dreams as rapt pale specters, drinking in rivers of sweat. When you held the branch of black angel flowers to your heart in dreams and held out your thick scoured hands, your family unable to look at you. Only after you churned the red earth for all its worth, for all their worth. Only after announcing that all ancient things be shaped into iron, after every animal had slunk away, and the sons and daughters of the past were rekindled with their shadowed families. Only then did you sit on your porch breathing in fire, master of your domain, watching the blackbirds plough and sweat for crops reserved for you alone – satisfaction on your lips, a hubris glint in your eyes. But even then, the land would remain unchanged, unyielding, and would always be as it had been, long before you and long after you.
Jakob Ryce is a freelance writer, teacher and poet from Melbourne, Australia. He has a B.A. in English Lit, and his work has been published in On The Premises, Drunk Monkeys, and the Wyndham Writing Awards. Jakob’s first chapbook of poetry is due to be published this year.