Poem: Pink Bay, Kangaroo Island
In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Rhiannon Burner of Adelaide writes of a South Australian gem – Kangaroo Island.
Pink Bay, Kangaroo Island
The sunlight skips ahead into the secret green places, curved with the dark wigs of the she-oaks, their brown trunks dipping into stiff and graceful bows. The sea waves hello and it waves goodbye, the tide tip-toeing forward to surprise the silent pink rocks with a kiss. The birds are feathered excess, floating from tree to tree, hillside to hillside. The sunlight moves from here to there.
Driving, on Kangaroo Island
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My parents drive this way so often they have named the trees above us; leaning, touching their leafy fingertips, the trees bend into a dragon’s ribcage; the little one my parents call it, the other is bigger. Kangaroos, island namesakes, bound forth, across the road, as randomly as ping pong balls. Today the sea is silent as paper yet to be written on. I am sitting in the back, peaceful as the window. We listen to the AM radio we sing loudly when we know the words.
Rhiannon Burner is a Trekkie – a Star Trek “tragic”. She has a first-class honours degree in Gender Studies from the University of Adelaide, is a former political staffer, and now works in the public service. Her self-confessed, excessive consumption of pop culture seriously gets in the way of the volume of poetry she’s otherwise been trying to write, for more years than she’d care to admit. Nothing, however, stops her from being a frequent and long-term visitor, to her favourite Kangaroo Island.
Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. A poetry book will be awarded to each contributor.