SPRING BURNING by Glen Phillips

I stood thigh deep
in wild oats on
a roadside verge
of mine. This spring
greening had plumped them.
The full heads nodded
heavy on emerald fibre optic shafts
and swayed in the breath
that shook
the loose-leafed eucalypts.

And yes, summer
Would come like a
brazen border-invader
soaring up the stalks
with a brief
rinse of gold
before husks become pale flags
fluttering
at the edge of farms.

Then we must think
a falling spark
of conflagration
in this dry grass
could sweep for miles.

Better to act now!
A spring burning
would see us safe
all summer long.

But still I stood;
whichever way
I looked, the road
stretched on and on.

After all, this
was just another
growing oat crop.

It’s hard to clear
the feral off
your property.

Then I felt spring
still burning
in me.

Glen Phillips
© 2005


EXEGESIS: SPRING BURNING


In the early nineties, I was engaged in a major research program which concluded with the making of the television series ‘Landscape and You’. Incidentally, still screening on Perth television. For the television episodes we went back to my childhood birthplace of Southern Cross and other areas of the Wheatbelt where I spent many years of my life. I worked also with a very talented photographer, Susan Storm, and one of her enduring images was of me in spring time, standing waist-deep in a blaze of road verge wildflowers. I was looking at this image one day and was reminded of how so many rare native plants and animals have been destroyed by the widening of country roads. When I was a child, the roads were narrow gravel tracks with trees arching overhead. Now, not only are there much reduced verges, but many are regularly burned, trimmed back by horribly destructive slashing machines and invaded by wild oats and other alien plant species. I know this is in the name of road safety, fire prevention and the ‘control’ of what farmers call vermin. Nevertheless, all this is increasing the vulnerability and even extinction of many species and, of course, dramatically reducing the spring showings of wildflowers upon which much of our tourist trade depends. To me, it is all a reminder of the settler-invader culture of my forebears (and those of many other Australians), whose assumptions about land ownership have been brought into serious question by the conservationist conscience of today’s generations. In most Wheatbelt regions, fortunately, there are changes afoot. I hope it is not too late. Actually, my poem, ‘Spring Burning’ is only superficially about these problems. The poem is, of course really about the using up of one’s life by the carelessness of our youthful years. In middle life, as Dante well knew, you take a more conservationist attitude to the years you have left. You begin to think that you must avoid the ‘outside’ threats to your health, your material assets, even the amount of pleasure you can allow yourself. You begin to think your days of being a life ‘producer’ are to be substituted for by being miserly with what you have already got. We all know there is a great risk of becoming more conservative politically as you grow older. Witness the fear of all kinds of ‘ferals’ among certain community sectors. We grow fearful of ‘boat people’ and so called illegal immigrants. Throw ‘em overboard! But what keeps us human, hopefully, is that inside each of us there is still the most powerful force of all, the cyclical energy of desire, the pleasure of yet another (undeniable) spring.

Glen Phillips