Harvest Poem for The New Normal
There’s a red tinge to the sky this harvest
and I can smell the smoke in the air.
They say the wall of fire is coming
so we’d better get down to the beach.
There’ll be no harvest this year
since the fires took the crops.
There’ll be no food on the shelves,
in the shops, and the pantry’s running low.
There’s no home to return to now,
since the fires raced through the village.
The insurance company’s bitching
and the government’s doing hardly nothing.
The pub is empty now, it looks like it’s closed,
with everyone either fighting fires
or down with smoke or burns or killed,
and my family’s in Sydney to get away from this.
