I travelled the endless land
Flat horizon panning out to nowhere,
Vast swathes of land cleared of every tree and bush,
White man desert.
And arriving in a town I saw the monument
Like you see in every country town
Commemorating the generations of white men
Who fought in the two World Wars
And many other besides
South Africa, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq…
Bearing the same words like the other thousands of monuments
All over Australia
´Lest We Forget´.
Then
I saw the people who once lived out there
On the land, now a white man desert
Who now found themselves marooned
In another kind of white man desert: the modern life:
Suburbs, Mc mansions, shopping centres, SUV´s,
Commercialism, emptiness and glitz……
Saw them
Survivors going nowhere with nowhere to go
Bereft of a reason to live, the only country left to them
A haze of drink and drugs
Marooned in a land which no longer made sense.
´Lest we forget´.
The fallen, those first people
Driven from one desert to another
By invaders who remembered
Their own dead
Never mind the corpses under their feet.