summer loving

By | 30 March 2026

Summer’s gold hums on the horizon. Brothers and sisters, the oysters are in season. A promise then, we will fill our bellies tonight. We’ll be seduced in a tumble of kangaroo grass and yam daisies. Step softly into our circle. Surrender to this moment. The bush is our cathedral today. We have no need for stained-glass windows. Our communion—Lush and leafed among the paperbark trees and mangroves. Divine architecture surrounds us. You, loose-limbed and lovely. We, bare-footed and beautiful.


come reverent
come in prayer
come honeymouthed
come for the living we will do.

Some of you have travelled from afar to be here. Welcome. Some of you carry heartache and grief in your bones. I sense some of you are weary from battles waged against our oppression. Know this: there is medicine here at the aromatic altar of acacia and ash. Let peace sink into your blood. Your hearts will be healed here when you bathe in waves holding the matriverse.


Quiet your mind, friends.
Breathe deep
to the beat of the bush
to the trill of the magpie singing the moon.
Drink the nectar of a summering sky.
Carry a blissful breeze into your lungs.



It is time to fall in love— with yourself, and each other. When dusk pulls your eyelids shut, pour stardust into one another’s palms, fingertips touching fingertips with cosmic light. Flash your pearly whites, friends. Stun each other —flirtatious as the moon speaking to the ocean. Smile until we find oblivion. Throw your legs into an emu dance. Our feet won’t leave the ground, but oh, we will fly high tonight.


Our feathered skirts will carry a westerly wind beneath them.

Aunties and Uncles, I’m calling to that wind. Calling to stories we shall dance beneath the stars—those stars offering a glimpse of all-time. My loves, we will come home to ourselves tonight. Us, home in our breath and alive in our breathlessness. We will kiss moonlight from one another’s skin. Divine beings, you are —spellbinding all of you. Oh, we are ripe with the hymn of an afternoon storm. Let’s make a new bloodline tonight in the sand dunes. Hip bone caressing hip bone, we will make the sky blush at our sensuous meditations.



Blessed be the taste of our liberation.
Blessed be the flame of our bodies warming the night against a coming cool.
Blessed be the ecstasy of loving in the tender light of midnight.
Tomorrow, we will rise with the sun. Rise with the crow. Rise triumphant—still alive, for another day, another minute.

 


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Merinda Dutton is a Barkandji and Gumbaynggirr woman, mother, lawyer, and co-founder of Blackfulla Bookclub on Instagram, whose creative practice explores kinship, country, and justice through poetry and storytelling. Her work has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Australian Poetry Journal, the Suburban Review and she contributed to the anthology Words to Sing the World Alive.

More by Merinda Dutton on Cordite Poetry Review →

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