Victim of a Lonely Planet

I wrote this poem a year ago and it has sat unpublished ever since.

At the time, I didn’t really know what I was writing. It felt like I was just paying attention. A place, a day, a feeling that pushed me to put pen to paper. The contrast between what something could be and what it becomes.

Reading it now, it’s clearer what was bubbling away.

I was trying to understand how the big ideas like tourism, wealth, status and consumption force themselves into ordinary places. Into small coastal towns, walking tracks and empty houses. Into the rhythm of a Sunday afternoon.

I didn’t have the language for it then, so I wrote it the only way I could. I wasn’t thinking about systems or incentives or what drives people to do what they do. I just felt that something was off. That what looked like leisure and beauty on the surface carried something else underneath.

This poem is an attempt to understand what we’re actually part of.

Victim of a Lonely Planet 

Hyams Beach, Autumn

Floating on fervent tides at Hyams Beach, I land. 

My feet in the sand, eyes to the sky, 

I stand, a shadow below, scribbly gum;

pale, knotted with squiggle, the scribble of an ancient scribe.

I trundle in bracken-laden Duck Gully, fronds rustle emerald in marbled sun

and sigh of a wild sanctuary beneath the noise.

It’s autumn. Above Chinamans Beach,

empty holiday homes stand like mannequins in glass displays.

Grey kangaroos lope merchandised streets,

hop by mowers and blowers – tools for wealth maintained.

A last blast of summer hits.

A sultry Sunday stirs the town awake; solitude shed like a second skin.

This place feels like the victim of a Lonely Planet

where tourists follow blue commandments; blind to the cost borne by others.

The foreshore heaves with pilgrims pursuing Mecca;

thousands seeking the ‘whitest sand in the world’.

Revellers froth in turquoise waters, bobbing together in souvenir waves.

Offshore in deeper, darker seas, a navy vessel drills for war.

Across the bay a lighthouse bears the buzz of jet skis and weekend sailors.

Aloft, unfussed by the hustle, yellow-tailed black cockatoos soar. 

Dark feathers contrast azure skies. They fly with reluctance, 

flapping only when gravity requires.

Grounded. 

Driving home, 

for sale signs bid me farewell, calling, hoping to lure me

as if I ever left.