Millennium Drought © Barry Collier 2025
Millennium Drought
Smooth and twisted,
bare grey branches reach up
like beggars in some ancient market,
as the once-proud scarecrow, scolded, aching
leans over in the shrinking, baking, red crust-
paying daily homage, as he knows he must,
to this cruel, stubborn mistress from the West-
his knowing, black-button eyes now staring
into the growing fissure beneath his fraying feet:
beckoning him like a modern-day Persephone,
its serrated grin scoffing at the lonely green Combine
keeping vigil, praying for redemption, always waiting
for that key of life, as she has these past five seasons now.
‘Been bad, but never like this;
Climate Change they call it.’
Prayers abandoned,
another morning sun stokes the brutal furnace,
as he sits under the moaning, groaning iron roof
sharing a sliver of shade with that moth-eaten magpie;
he leans back on the wilting wall of the front verandah
in the cherished chair his great-great-grandfather carved
when he stole the holding from the knowing, vindictive bush;
his gun across his lap, in contrite conversation with the old man:
“Shot the last of the sheep down by the dry creek bed yesterday;
our ram, emaciated, stood his ground, defiant as ever, demanding,
pleading with me, then daring me just to get it over and done with-
and yet, as his dull, grey eyes met mine through the sights
I thought I saw a final flicker of forgiveness, and I cried.”
‘Worst in at least a hundred-
perhaps even the millennium-
this El Nino thing is here to stay:
and it’s Climate Change they say.’
Wife long gone,
kids drifted to Sydney or another town;
yet, from inside their forsaken homestead
he hears the mutterings of generations past:
he may be the last-but the first to let their proud name down;
his despondent eyes drawn to the family plot on that distant hill
and, as two wedge-tails survey yesterday’s massacre, they come,
as he knew they would, in coats and hats and ties, writs in hand:
heartless men in a heartless land, there by the locked farm gate,
escorted by two police, affixing his shame: for sale or for lease;
no way out: the bankers with their high-priced silks saw to that;
perhaps he should make a stand, protest their final act of theft;
as the Westerly blows, this is all he knows: one more bullet left.
© Barry Collier
Notes
The drought which began with low rainfall in late 1996 and affected much of the country finally ended in 2010. Called the ‘millennium drought’ it is regarded as the worst since European settlement began in 1788.
Millennium Drought won First Prize for Free Verse in the 2016-2017 National Henry Lawson Literary Society Awards. It also appeared in Beyond Lawson, the 2022 anthology inspired by the works of this great Australian poet.