Elegy for Joshua Hardy This is not a poem about loss, it's about planting one foot in the turf and wrapping your leg languidly around a plump Sherrin before tea. Tilt, twist and pivot, send that leather bean soaring high towards the Eucalypts. Sorry Albert – ghostly gums; there's still no better way. This is not a poem about loss, it's about promise beyond a vulgar epithet. Eulogia is 'high praise', but there's nothing Greek about these speeches, this music, the ferrous dust that covers my brogues. Stop trying to possess him, claim him, covet your story, talk it away with the Christ or the hackneyed straddling of 'Two Worlds'. He didn't walk between them, he just was, is and ever shall remain, a man not a slogan. This is not a poem about loss, it's about screaming so softly that you feel your lungs pressing against your sternum, tossing the dirt in the hole and having it blow back into your eyes. You know the Waratahs still stare back at me rotting, rancid bracts quizzically turning in, vital but death red. This is not a poem about loss, but it is surely not about 'high hospitality' either. Stringy barbecued duck and the comfort of community are as useful as ginger-orange juice at the market, lukewarm bitter in an aluminium can, Eucalyptus smoke waved over the body or a freshly printed pamphlet. This is not another poem about loss, don't you dare make a scene. Be easy. The Rubbish Country The fire started on the rubbish country, resinous marma grasses don't burn hot. Lizards, mice and birds manage to scrape by among the feather topped spinifex tufts. The wind whipped the front toward the Mulgas ruffling the Buffel grass, stubborn green weeds – the last thing rooted after a dry spell. Endemic, the leprous cascade rumbled leaping bush to bush, climbing smooth gum trunks. They held bolt upright, sometimes toppling onto motley clusters of cellophane. Canopy met churned stump, prickle and dirt a teratoma of hair, nails, teeth, fat, cannibalistic cancer of good things. Eddies conduct the awful percussion into the night, casting ash flecked off timber ribbons high enough to warp the moon. It could have been a fiction. You have to know that I myself did not see the flames burnish the land. Before long, boots will tread over fresh shoots, sink prints into blackened