Sunday Afternoon Guitars

Soundtrack - True Crime Motel - Cath Carroll

Not her best album - that is of course England Made Me but the second track on this one - into day - is a doozy.

Canberras

In the middle of an empty week
away from school and other darker things,
we walked a causeway to the sea
and watched the planes land feet away,
bright yellow diamonds in the sky,
with engines deep enough to hurt;
and make our insides buzz and bleed.
We saw them first at limits, the horizon
beckoning them to earth and home.
And then in instants never realised,
they passed over us like ghosts
with screams and safety markings.
"No Step" "Emergency" "walk here".
So loud they broke the bounds of senses,
overflowing from our ears to eyes,
to make our vision faulty in the mind.

And in the quiet of a sandy afternoon,
we found a dead one, burnt and empty,
a practice for the firemen and foam,
blackened, deconstructed by the wind,
inside the fence, a hundred feet across
the dunes, in grass and watched we thought.
To my blind eyes my brother added terror
as he climbed the wire and ran, a soldier,
a thief of aeroplanes and black insignia.
I saw him silhouetted, shaded by the mountains
as he wrenched metal from this whale
and brought it back to me, the coward,
blind and deaf and gibbering and waiting
for the gunshots from the towers.
His enemies were mine and this plane
crashed and died for us to see this day.