Poem: Racing the Kangaroo Island Bus
In this week’s Poet’s Corner, Jeri Kroll shares a second poem from her latest book, the award-winning verse novel ‘Vanishing Point’.
Racing the Kangaroo Island Bus
The bus drones in the distance like a shark patrol scanning the coast. But the road’s empty as I gallop past, gums and pines guarding the fence. Just as we wheel around again the KI bus enters the race, audience glued to the glass, snapping their final memories. Then there’s me and my horse – we streak past the bus, a pulse of bronze and blue, flashing between the trees as the sun sets. Some point and click this last glimpse of country. Horse and human – whoosh and blink – who was that? No matter. Now we will always be that fleeting thought looping through someone’s mind, grasped, then gone. And we are still moving together into the dark. We love these moments when muscles stretch out, everything fluid and free in our endless circle. It’s what we are for in the time we have left. No one else needs to know who, why or how. We’re here here now.
Jeri Kroll is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Flinders University. An award-winning writer for adults and young people, she has published twenty-five books, the most recent being Workshopping the Heart: New and Selected Poems (Wakefield Press 2013), and the verse novel Vanishing Point (Puncher and Wattman 2015). Today’s poem is from Vanishing Point, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Queensland Literary Awards; in the USm the George Washington University stage adaptation of Vanishing Point was a winner in the 47th Kennedy Centre American College Theatre Festival. More about Vanishing Point can be found here.
