Science  Write  Now

i
Consider the rabbit:
vegetarian, pacifist,
exceptional breeder,
submissive in comely brown fur
shaped for the arm’s cradling.
But twitchy-eared 
and trembling. Ever poised 
between fright and flight.

ii
Yours, like theirs, was a forced migration;
shanghaied, confined below deck in a corner of their cramped hutch.

With them, you escaped the ocean’s maw,
made landfall under a boundless sky, in glittering light.

You, like them, sniffed opportunity in the bracing air,
felt the susurration from headland scrub as a mute welcome.

Like them, you could not believe your luck;
the vast territory, the feral freedom, the ticket of leave and land grants.

iii
We set our traps,
my brother and I
in late winter and early spring evenings 
as chimney smoke
drifted above mill houses
in the cooling air.

We set our traps
as our father taught us:
scooping a soft bed at the burrow entrance
for the steel spring trap,
prising open the saw-toothed mouth, 
fixing the trigger,
camouflaging the lethal bite
with sand, leaf litter and bracken.

iv
In the photo
my brother and I
pose mid-road
trying to grin,
rabbits strung from our hands
by their hind legs,
the mill and palisade of karri 
our backdrop.

v
Like you and them, we are new Australians. 
Like you and them: invader, settler, colonist.

Originally published in Brushstrokes III: Ros Spencer Poetry Contest Anthology 2022.