Carefree

Carefree

Carefree

And you’d never forget the pelicans
Because it was their home too,
And that occasional one who’d try and swallow your baited hook
While we cast out into an endless mould of brown and blue skin,
Sometimes catching a line in its enormous and clumsy wingspan,
Floating around the jetty, constantly boasting that huge gullet,
So close to the pylons covered in poison oyster shells
That waited for the bare flesh within our gait
Inviting our little black legs to dance,
Mum worried that we’d get sick from eating them
Dad saying the sewage from the caravan park
Would sometimes flow near where we fished
And that the oysters bathed in it too

Little buckets of bream, silver catch of a meal
And the persistent cats at our ankles
Lapping up the smell,
Running up past the shop; a front window necropolis of stonefish in Vegemite jars
Suspended in a vault of alcoholic brine; still deadly in death
And us in bare feet all the time,
Three kids in stonefish-infested mud
Playing Russian roulette –
One good pair of running shoes between us!