Island - 155 poem 2 Dec Written By Todd Turner Road to La Masiera It is good to be on the patched and potholed road among the diesel cowboys, toxic utes and earth-churned air. Here, everything's rich with intention or at ease with the lack of it: car-lot farmyards loaded with Bedford trucks and block-bound F100s, weed-fringed shipping containers and sunken caravans, rusting with gypsy dreams. Cluttered in jumble and strewn with scrap for the tip, the whole place brims with a collective shrug: loose-fenced paddocks,trailers, boats and corrugated tin lie side by side. And like a troupe of the nonchalant, the locals fish out of dams under beach umbrellas while a herd of cows stand up to their teats, cooling in tea-coloured water. Wherever you look, sprawling flat vistas are dotted with ramshackle sheds, chicken farms and quasi-palatial brickyard homes. Look, here comes The Big Chook and here come thoseCorinthian pillars, larger than the history of Greece. Droll and bewildering, palm trees and cactus plants add a certain continental colour to the roadside. You could say it's all hotchpotch and mutton stew, a Mediterranean Texas among the gums.Goats and llamas, bedizened with flies, are herded within a trove of worn-out tyres, metal debris and Florentine statuettes.The mix of warmth and neglect has their teeth glinting yellow in the sun. In this Eden of fountains and phoney flamingos, a lame horse drinks from the troughs of replenished cloud.On hillocks of backhoed dirt, somnolent birds roost and flutter up, sifting the earth.They peck at the roasted sprouts of wildflowerand sun-fed weed, dig into whatever else has taken root through the drifts of heat and hothouse rain. Todd Turner
Island - 155 poem 2 Dec Written By Todd Turner Road to La Masiera It is good to be on the patched and potholed road among the diesel cowboys, toxic utes and earth-churned air. Here, everything's rich with intention or at ease with the lack of it: car-lot farmyards loaded with Bedford trucks and block-bound F100s, weed-fringed shipping containers and sunken caravans, rusting with gypsy dreams. Cluttered in jumble and strewn with scrap for the tip, the whole place brims with a collective shrug: loose-fenced paddocks,trailers, boats and corrugated tin lie side by side. And like a troupe of the nonchalant, the locals fish out of dams under beach umbrellas while a herd of cows stand up to their teats, cooling in tea-coloured water. Wherever you look, sprawling flat vistas are dotted with ramshackle sheds, chicken farms and quasi-palatial brickyard homes. Look, here comes The Big Chook and here come thoseCorinthian pillars, larger than the history of Greece. Droll and bewildering, palm trees and cactus plants add a certain continental colour to the roadside. You could say it's all hotchpotch and mutton stew, a Mediterranean Texas among the gums.Goats and llamas, bedizened with flies, are herded within a trove of worn-out tyres, metal debris and Florentine statuettes.The mix of warmth and neglect has their teeth glinting yellow in the sun. In this Eden of fountains and phoney flamingos, a lame horse drinks from the troughs of replenished cloud.On hillocks of backhoed dirt, somnolent birds roost and flutter up, sifting the earth.They peck at the roasted sprouts of wildflowerand sun-fed weed, dig into whatever else has taken root through the drifts of heat and hothouse rain. Todd Turner
