Truth is buried in our backyard. It pushes up the weed and paspalum, the wet-the-beds and buffalo. It sucks on the sandy and sunbrown soil and struggles to sprout its revelations.
But it’s easier, I know, for us to mow it down. To stand bare-footed with a comfortable drink and admire the behaving turf.
It fights with spears and sticks, with bindiis and dewdrop, so why do I prefer the emerald sound and high-pitched perfume of petrichor?
No harm there, we tell ourselves. The past is the past is the past.
Dig a pool, they say. Build a basement. How far down do we go? Where are the bones? Perhaps one thin crust of white, the poor condemned by the Old Bailey, then beneath that: a million veins of black, old and young, layer upon layer upon layer like a devil’s cake? Or will they never be freed – already displaced by a squadron of soldiers or a savage shearer or, more recently I suppose, a developer?
And instead of water a few metres below will we find crowded red rivers? Billabongs tinted a perfect claret? I will dive until I find the mermaids and mermen, glorious in their unknown afterlife, singing songs I’ll never understand and fighting for land and air.
The agent covets our backyard. Smells the heady green aroma of dollars and dominion. His great god Mammon declares the sandy and sunbrown strata the skins of kings and mastery, of cannons and conquest. In the bright pain of sunlight I see earth and loam and picture forgetful rows of lavender and rose. But after the sky has died I hear them, women crying, the men inflamed, the children…well.
Perhaps those who wander the lawns in the far future will decipher the stratum.
Return plunder to the pilfered.
Listen to the dead.
