Can you convince the wind to change

direction? The Opera House dishes in their rack

are browning again. The government wants them whitewashed

by massive, shock-jock-endorsed horse-racing ads.

It’s nearly summer and November’s going loopy.
The sky turns ochre, orange to some, amid purple-greys—

depends on the screen you see things through

and whether or how you recall the dust-red dawn

of 2009 that loomed over the Blue Mountains

from the southwest like something sci-fi,
how it crept in the early hours into the city in slow motion

the way a red container ship now glides as if on ice

over choppy waters under the Harbour Bridge.

Today’s another ‘scary fire day’. People are out and amongst it,

spending everything on Xmas, dealing with the trauma
of a year’s overload. The sun’s not a sphere,

it’s a funnel that sucks the world’s energy up like a vacuum,

spits it back out in shards of light or in hard

slabs of heat the size of continents.

Wind drags dust from inland out through the heads,
Country in its teeth. When the dust-red dawn

dwarfed Sydney it was much redder than this

orange-grey haze people are dissing on the tweets

like it’s nothing, like there aren’t still tonnes

of it settling on every windowsill, millions
of airborne specks turning sinuses to rage.

As a two-year-old, Evie was afraid of specks;

couldn’t comprehend them. She used to point and scream

at any tiny fleck invading her bath-time and -space—

they were alive, could morph into other forms.
Or maybe she understands them too well, how our bodies

are always morphing. She’s been watching

Alice in Wonderland—‘a big girl now,’ not a dot

inside a tummy anymore, and difficult to allegorise,

given our background in colonial poiesis.
The sound of an invisible cannon-shot thunders

and echoes from the sandstone and concrete

beneath the bridge on the northern side of the harbour,

dragging me back to the steering wheel I’ve drifted off behind

on the southern side as I take a break from deliveries.
Twenty more bangs go off and, with each, a further

twenty echoes are delayed by what seems

two hundred years or more. Sky turns maroon.

Through the windscreen, a dirty rainbow.

On the road, red’s caked in the puddles of this morning’s
rainshower. How do I talk to my daughters

about all the tiny beliefs being part of the big ones,

about tipping points that have already been breached,

about the version of history they’ll inherit

that can’t go back to time immemorial and that’ll
probably soon completely cease reverberating

through the future’s waters? The car shakes. Wind

lifts the sedan, spinning me up to the palm tree canopies

and for a moment we’re all doing helicopters—

fronds, hair, car, heads, arms (I imagine my daughters
airborne too)—dispersing dust, trying to shake it off.

I return to land, watch the specks we picked up

get whisked over Gadigal and out to sea,

tiny flecks of red and black subsumed back in-

to the ongoing fallout and wash-up.