The Olgas

I
From first light we see them;
pink on the horizon,
their heads tilted down
leaning in,
talking to themselves.

All day we travel,
and they grow
as we hoping against hope
each red dune is the last.

But from the east a cold wind
splinters our clothes,
and the domes look like vanishing
into the plain of spinifex
before we reach them.

II
This dark night,
desert air reaches
beyond the humanness
of place.

It is an aching silence
pulsing
with destruction.

All our walking
in ‘undiscovered country’
is the discovery of
emptiness,
of silence, of nothing.

Midnight thinking is black
and as the tent walls
flex and stretch
I want to be somewhere else.