The City I’ll Never Know
I.
In fateful canterbury,
on that humid,
heat-baked
tuesday
I was only a baby—
infantilely wailing
through the plummeting earth,
a suburbia
flipped on its back
like an upturned turtle.
An incomprehensible
mess
was made of downtown,
a massacre
so grim
I wonder if even the birds knew
that the world was ending.
We were a city of swamp,
drained in the name
of a colonisers’ god,
and still
ponder how we succumbed,
so simply,
to the earth.
II.
When the sunlight first flooded
those neo-gothic halls,
like a cave,
—apocalyptic,
—-falling inward,
did the age-ridden angels
finally exhale in freedom?
holy greatness and
architectural beauty,
designed to fragility,
was carved
from quarry mined stone—
and crumbled
by its own birth.
Who knew a shifting plate,
twisting tales deep,
could return
a cathedral
to crater.
III.
Blessed were the ones
who knew not
to be ripped from their homes,
their lives plowed
to a redzone
so green, making room for
rained-down
swamps and
flax-formed water ways.
The unstable acre,
—unlivable,
—–unbreathable,
became root
to those that bear
the weight of
political discourse,
and
our conditional sense
of humanity.
Evidence
we aren’t exempt
from nature,
— falling in,
—–melting with.
It’s evidence
which makes me ask:
Were we ever worth rebuilding?
IV.
Aimless,
boundless,
we are a generation
of loose ends.
Do you know how it feels
to grow up in a
rock tumbling tide,
—manic,
—–mutable?
A city too fluid
to ever feel like home,
growing too fast
and growing not at all.
There’s a guilt
in moving forward
on land
which is not yours.
—Unfamiliar,
—–uncanny,
impossible to comprehend
that we traded
our art,
our angels,
our soul,
for concrete geometrics
and glass panels walls,
melting in the sun
crackling
once more.
We’re a city
rebuilt,
not responsible
for the erosion
brought down.
A new generation
sprouting
from the rigid cracks,
a community of change,
foreign,
revolting in hope.
On the shifting tides,
we are rose-tinted,
reborn.
Jessica McIntosh
Year 12
Hillmorton High School
