K A Nelson
K A Nelson studied at the University of New England, and once lived and worked in New Zealand, PNG, and Central Australia. She now lives in Canberra. Since 2010 she has won three poetry prizes, had poems published in The Canberra Times, Award Winning Australian Writing, Australian Poetry and anthologised (Canberra poets). She is working on her first collection.
This is a Woman Who Travels the Land
In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down;
when the only cars on Commonwealth Avenue
are taxis changing shifts or ministerial staff cars
taking the lackeys home; when flags hang slack
in the dark and stiffen in the cold on their steel poles;
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
who calls me daughter, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance:
She is a woman who travels the land
Where stories are danced and country is sung
Where magic and myth is retold in the sand
Where kinship and totems are like lines on a hand
This is a woman who travels with women
Whose customs and life move in time with the moon
Whose birth on a songline means obligation
Whose night sky is peopled with ancestral kin
This is a woman who travels with crows
Who glides across country as hunter and healer
Who teaches clanswomen all that she knows
Who carries the lore wherever she goes
This is a woman who travels around
on everywhere roads criss-crossing the land
She knows bitumen highways lead to trouble in town
gridlock the cities; spoil old hunting grounds
Kapirnangku nyanyi, kapirnangku nyanyi, kapirnangku nyanyi *
In the early hours of these bitter mornings
when the fog comes down and stays down
my thoughts fly north to the desert – to a woman
I call mother, who took me to Dinner Camp
told me a story, taught me a song, showed me a dance.
She is a woman now elder and leader
She is a woman who travels the land
She is a woman who longs for old times –
God love her!
She is a woman, the last of her kind.
* kapirnangku nyanyi: Warpiri farewell: ‘I will see you’