Greg Page
Greg Page is a Koori Poet from the La Perouse community at Kamay (Botany Bay). He holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from UTS in Sydney and has been published in the Australian Poetry Journal and the Koori Mail. He lives on unceded Bidjigal land. Dox him at linktr.ee/boypage.
Barbed Wire
Earlier poems on barbed wire have proved unsatisfactory
Not that I know any, but if they were worthwhile I probably would
There’s no bigger symbol of the invasion
And the continent is still covered in the stuff
It might be offensive to talk about barbed wire
Perhaps not as plain rude as asking someone’s salary
A wealthy person’s salary that is
I’ll quite naturally admit my $16k annual jobseeker rate
Rust has a kind of beauty to it
Did they think through what happens to discarded industrial metal items?
‘We all have to go so we may as well go down the gurgler with microplastics’
Perhaps edible plastics might solve all our problems
There’s nothing hidden about the violence of barbed wire
That’s the thing I like most about it
It’s honest truth telling — a voice to Parliament
The ongoing mesh network communicating terror on the frontier
At the speed of light your sadnesses prove ineffective
Good intentions and Koalas are no match for intentional bulldozers
There’s a lot of uncertainty on the land these days
Good labour is so difficult to find even at $16k