Eroded Hills

loss memory rhymed verse melancholic

Eroded Hills - meaning Summary

Landscape, Loss and Longing

Judith Wright’s Eroded Hills portrays a landscape stripped by earlier generations and exposed to winter’s harshness. The speaker remembers drinking from scant creeks and finding chance fruit, but remains uneasy. The degraded hills stand for neglect and inherited loss. Imagining them bandaged in snow, the speaker seeks protection and renewal and yearns for thoughts to take root and endure like trees after leaves and birds have gone.

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These hills my father’s father stripped And beggars to the winter wind They crouch like shoulders, naked and whipped Humble, abandoned, out of mind Of their scant creeks I drank once And ate sour cherries from old trees Found in their gullies fruiting by chance Neither fruit nor water gave my mind ease I dream of hills bandaged in snow Their eyelids clenched to keep out fear When the last leaf and bird go Let my thoughts stand like trees here.