Samuel Wagan Watson Poems

I can't speak my grandmother's tongue and I've never been on my grandfather's land,
I've travelled here and I've travelled there,
my culture replicated in government-funded laboratories;
...

you'd never forget the pelicans
because it was their home too
and that occasional one who'd try and swallow your baited hook
while we cast out into an endless mould of brown and blue skin
...

the pyromaniacs of the gods were kicking it
into that desert sunset
upon a fire pink, burner-blue horizon line
blossoms cherry red
...

for David Gilbey

fire-engine flash of fox pelt
and a plume of tail
...

I remember construction cranes like herds of frozen praying-mantis, high on the steamy Bjelke-Petersen plateau above a brown snake-coiled river. It was from this view, at the age of 4, that I learnt to read the columns of Brisbane city.
...

Sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind
Is early childhood and black humour
White stucco dreaming
...

"the journey IS the destination"
a quote from a great traveller
Brisbane is a small city, but that's OK . . . 'cause I don't need much room to move . .
...

My brothers once showed me the bounty that could be had in bait nets / we were able to catch garfish / bills like half-baked marlin / the rounded quill with a fluorescent orange head; pencil fish, that's what the old diggers called them,
...

Midnight's boxer He has become
That the ghosts from the ‘tents' of long-ago pay homage
Memories that fill a boarding-house room,
Busted knuckles soothed endlessly with goanna oil
...

For Rhan . . . wherever you are, Brother, I pray your path is a good one and without crossroads . . .
It was a dark and stormy night of clichés! The rain coming down, drowning the shadows, and my motley crew, well, that hotel room just couldn't hold us.
...