Nothing remains
By Virginia Jealous
Behind the sand bar,
on the inlet’s calm, an elegance of banded stilts;
sanderlings teeter the edge, gleaning
between ziplines of intertidal crabs
and prints of claws and toes and rubber soles.
In the car park, roos scavenge locusts
squashed against the radiator grille.
The heath’s a grey-green sea, melding
to ocean bluer than the sky.
Families fish turquoise water from a talcum beach,
wind-scoured; the kids’ complaints
drift upwards to the headland
and the rusted folly of the rabbit-fence
– nothing remains besides
some stranded wire, a post or two.
This antique landscape’s living
proof of some imperative to fill
an emptiness that, even as it fills,
is void again,
where temporary interruptions
leave a new blank slate
on which to make a mark,
or leave a trace, or be erased.