Late Summer Fires by Les Murray
The paddocks shave black with a foam of smoke that stays, welling out of red-black wounds. In the white of a drought this happens. The hardcourt game. Logs that fume are mostly cattle, inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns. Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped, even this day rolls over, slowly. At dusk, a family drives sheep out through the yellow of the Aboriginal flag.
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