For the Quaternary Age (Judith Wright)

When I looked down above the China Sea
on archipelagos of sullen pearl
and gaps of ocean flicked by sunlight's fin,
it set me staring downwards into me.

Quarternary Age that made me in your dream,
fertile and violent, swung from ice to heat
to flood to famine -- what you've grafted in!
Could I be calm, when you are so extreme?

You tried to drown us in your melt of flood
and freeze us staring in your glacial step.
Burned by your intermitting fires I've known
splinters of crystal forming in my blood;

Oppressed by shifts of rage and spells of calm,
I felt your lightening spread my limited skull,
setting me tasks no wisdom would have done;
thrusting in probes, filling the wounds with balm.

You teach apocalypse and hymns of praise,
the use of fire, methods of stone and steel,
sacrifice, surgery, physics, the worship of sun.
Bound to your flying heels we wreck our days.

Your unpredictable dealings drive us wild.
We haruspicate, compute and pray your weather,
retreat to hive in cities, foul nests of men;
but here in this dragon-shell I'm still your child,

adoring this sudden light, the gaps between
terrors, the glow of cloud-tops, crevices
of green serenity. Whimpering, half in love,
I press on the armoured glass to watch you, lean
to your diverse passages, asking what you mean
by those mute and merciful designs of pearl.

You knock me back with a fang-flash and a snarl.