Niggers Leap New England

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.

Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bayand beats with boats of cloud up from the seaagainst this sheer and limelit granite head.

Swallow the spine of range; be dark.

O lonely air.

Make a cold quilt  across the bone and skullthat screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliffand then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and climbing darka time for synthesis.

Night buoys no warningover the rocks that wait our keels; no bellssound for the mariners.

Now must we measureour 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 knownthe night that tidied up the cliffs and hid themhad the same question on its tongue for us.

And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamonor thin black children dancing like the shadowsof saplings in the wind.

Night lips the harshscarp of the tableland and cools its granite.

Night floods us suddenly as historythat 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)".