Signs of the new millennium
 

At the shopping centre
a ten year old talks
into a mobile phone
alone

Someone
all powder and peroxide
snarls at her septuagenarian mother
a woman old enough to be my mother
(and I've seen forty summers)
wears mini skirt and stockings
sheer and black

Driving home
on the radio, Ernie Dingo
speaks some Wudyadi
You white fellas, he translates

The unknown syllables
spill into my car
like the song of desert wind
the flow of subterranean streams
or tears on a rock

At home the paper
tells of attempts
to extinguish
Native Title

I shiver at the coming
forty winters
 
 

Carolyne Lee

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