This Landscape Before Me

Is unwritten, though it has lived in violence. First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum. Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain. I have no proof, but I tell you there were leadlight windows here once, barred. They cast a little striped light on the women. Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists. The rope and span and carded wool are unpicked as are their faces and names. Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare— as I say the words they are sucked away to a hemisphere in darkness. I will not presume to say what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place. At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. But this morning I saw a young rabbit hunched in brush and shadow. I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble, the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye. It had caught the disease we brought here for it and wanted a quiet place to die. And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get— there was time and light, the hawks and dogs had not been written yet, and were still out of sight.