MARALINGA Poem by John Kinsella

Hell is hollow, a gesture in a flat surface lipped in, the curve upturned - no same point if you keep going in the same direction; convex lore coated longer than words and longer than belief. A weeping tree in flower, a minuscule tree among the saltbush and deceased. A camel skeleton hunched big-boned against the track. Spirit-killer? It's a weapon they'd test a few times at least. Watson siding as water only here was apertured into lexical theft, before and after, to make the big bang, negate and relegate the gathering tribes - a plan - atomic warfare against a people so old they brought fear to investors in peerage, shock wave propelling the train slightly faster once out of Watson, where the first flock of birds seen since yesterday overfly warning markers, pink and grey galahs their chests shields worn in the x-ray rooms, all nature is conflated in the atom and there's no half-life of logic to ward off the insecurities. Clear sky thunder. The name retains. A given name. A Christian name. Exposure to the energy source of God by any sectarian configuration. Mirage of treed islands run blue, like a leak from the sky, blue blood shining over the expanse. Seriously, that's what you see: a spreading blue across the Axminster texture of the plain, as they would envisage it. Still holding the data, using it not an end in itself, down the track. That line of hills to the north. What do they hold back on the edge of the plain, the hollow bones.