Niggers Leap, New England

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.

Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay

and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea

against this sheer and limelit granite head.

Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.

Make a cold quilt  across the bone and skull

that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff

and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and climbing dark

a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning

over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells

sound for the mariners. Now must we measure

our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,

love by its end and all our speech by silence.

See in the gulfs, how small the light of home.

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,

and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?

O all men are one man at last. We should have known

the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them

had the same question on its tongue for us.

And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamon

or thin black children dancing like the shadows

of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh

scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.

Night floods us suddenly as history

that has sunk many islands in its good time.

Quote: "Judith Wright was the first white Australian poet to publicly name and explore the experiences of its Indigenous people in her poem 'Nigger's Leap', published in her first collection The Moving Image (1946). 'Like other great political poets, like Dante, like Anna Akhmatova, Wright's poetry tells, and tells lucidly, stories and truths that only poetry can really tell so they sear into the soul and can never be untold'. (Dorothy Porter)".