Late Summer Fires
The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.
In the white of a drought
this happens. The hardcourt game.
Logs that fume are mostly cattle,
inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns.
Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped,
even this day rolls over, slowly.
At dusk, a family drives sheep
out through the yellow
of the Aboriginal flag.
by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996