White Stucco Dreaming

White Stucco Dreaming

White Stucco Dreaming

Sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind
Is early childhood and black humour
White stucco dreaming
And a black Labrador,
An orange and black panel-van
Called the ‘black-banana’
With twenty blackfellas hanging out the back
Blasting through the white stucco umbilical
Of a working class tribe,
Front yards studded with old black tyres
That became mutant swans overnight
Attacked with a cane-knife and a bad white paint job

White stucco dreaming
And snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror of Mum’s scorn,
Snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto white stucco,
Temporarily blushing it pink
Amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings
And flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks
That echoed through little black minds and sent the Labrador insane

Chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud
Laid across white stucco
And mud cakes on the camp stove
That just made Dad see black,
No tree was ever safe from tree-house sprawl,
And the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets,
Peering into our white stucco cocoon,
Wishing, they were with us . . .