Les Wicks

Jerusalem Track The smoke has become another season. An element. It's collecting around the trees making their leaves seem weighted, a curve in that trunk suggesting recoil but everything is just doing the business as I walk through a forest that's anticipating the coming feast of fire under a chanting mat of cicadas. Elsewhere flames explode on touching rich eucalypt oils, minute white flowers lost in a sunburst. Will my season end so dark smudged & furious? Perhaps there is no alternative - summers never surrender - it's always declared war against heat by an undermining wind as the world turns over to warm its other half. I write this as I sit on an outcrop looking down on the Hawkesbury watching the young man climbing the slope (so much energy, spraying uselessly). Turn see an old man behind, not embarrassed to be caught in his thoughts over me. So we too are seasons. We too are smoke. Free & inevitable.

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