Tell our children we assembled with thunder in our eyes

Were named after a pink moon, were lunar dust

Or the rambling rain, were madness soured into surrender

Remind them oysters are best savoured with friends

Tell them we were deceived by men with harpoons for hands

as if violence was the same thing as desire

Tell them of the pirates, hunters on the east sea

How they marched across the ocean like assassins

sleeves rolled up to the elbow, hair combed into a side-part

How they bludgeoned a red star from her resting place

And once, during a meteor shower, ruthless in their hunger

and hands wielding seduction like weapons

in that hunger and with those horrid hands

fingertips turned to steel, ice or barbarism— they defiled the easterly tide

Tell them about the massacres, gunpowder pressing us into the evening

Our knife wounds licked open by the moon’s testimony

Tell them we wished for death, our gums rotted with grief

That we crowed the names of a thousand wounded children

As if it was the only thing between us and despair

Tell them there was nowhere left to bury the dead or the dying

That there’s a million ways to die in the west

But only one way to river yourself home

Remind them sleeplessness is an ailment of the heart

That a slow tongue is a wise mind

But there’s  no way or wisdom out of a city, underwater

Tell them we built an arc, but what came was war

our hands blistered and callused around a stingray’s barb

Tell them of the seeds we should have planted

and those we lost to the bombs

That sometimes war made us forgetful

Begged us to be deaf or blind, or all the way unconscious

Bestow them with a melody that will coax the moondust from our graves

Tell them how to slacken the fist, or loosen the tongue

Say which seeds to press into their wounds before bedtime

And when they’ve spent too long in despair

 gift them the memory of water

Take them back to our thundering dawn, to the east born tide, or that pink moon

Let them crow joy into their limbs

Teach them the brolga hop or the two-step

Unbind their sorrow from the knife-tinted morning

Hold their fingers against the setting sun

until they are no longer flesh, blood or water

Until the only thing left, is tomorrow