Parched
1
staring for hours at the wall
won’t change the world
but the crack diverging
from the window to door
will attune you to a life
on the banks of a driedout river where the page
is a tank filling with hours
of empty water
2
coughing phlegm into the
kitchen sink the mind
falls back into the body
that each day of work
almost makes you forget
3
you don’t cry anymore
and attribute this to the drought
a continent cracking like
a belt of brown leather
or the light reflecting
from the scalp of Kochie
like a sun that can’t stop rising
live on the Tele
4
as trains are transformed into
long steel rivers carrying
725,000 litres of water over 40km
everyday securing work for around
140 people drunk by two coalmines
near Lithgow
5
fall to your knees and
stick your arms into the air
allowing the eyes to roll back
with your head
now move your hands
like kelp-grass tossed by a wave
breathing carbon incantations
into the air
now imagine a glass of water
appearing between your knees
understand the process of transpiration
that you’ll never be a tree
6
dreaming of drinking the treated
piss of our neighbours or the
exposed ribs of a Kangaroo
in western New South Wales
as cotton is exported to Bangladesh
and transformed into a box
of black shirts that sail the Pacific
to sit on a Kmart shelf
while ideas of change
like a statue of Ned Kelly
or a lyre bird pinned to a cork board
remain almost forgotten
almost always historic
*Info on the transportation of water to coal mines can be found here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-08/water-train-saves-mine-and-jobs-inlithgow/11392468
Jake Goetz currently resides in Sydney’s Inner West. In 2019 his first book, meditations with passing water, was shortlisted for the QLD Premier’s Award. He is the editor of the sporadically-published online magazine, Marrickville Pause, and recently began a DCA in Writing at WSU.
