‘The Black Beaches’ and Other Poems

The Black Beaches

Yellow rimming the ocean
is mountains washing back
but lagoons in cleared land often
show beaches of velvet black

peat of grass and great trees
that were wood-fired towers
then mines of stary coals
fuming deep in dragon-holes.

This morning’s frost dunes
afloat on knee-sprung pasture
were gone in a sugar lick
leaving strawed moisture

but that was early
and a change took back the sun
hiding it in regrowth forest.
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