Australian poetry

Days later, not long after we left the convent,
the war ended. I promised to take her directly
to the train station, but the sight of her
on the back seat scrambling out of that uniform,

did it come in the bark of a dog
in the eucalypt air,

the marsupial faces tilted, listening,
or the ghostly skin and the foreign hair,

I breathe the leaves of the basil
It has news for me—
For all my senses

In back wards, sea spray thinning ash as the city
turned from itself, the ocean which brought it, faces off