River Bend

death loss free verse dark haunting

River Bend - meaning Summary

Landscape as Silent Witness

Judith Wright’s "River Bend" records a stark scene of death and abandonment beside a swollen river. The poem links a killed kangaroo-doe, the howling of a dog, and an elderly Indigenous woman foraging alone to suggest dispossession and loss. The river’s continuous, unchecked flow frames these losses as both immediate and ongoing, a natural witness whose persistent voice contrasts human silence and grief.

Read Complete Analyses

Who killed that kangaroo-doe, slender skeleton tumbled above the water with her long shanks cleaned white as moonlight? Pad tracks in the sand where something drank fresh blood. Last night a dog howled somewhere, a hungry ghost in need of a sacrifice. Down by that bend, they say, the last old woman, thin, black, and muttering grief, foraged for mussels, all her people gone. The swollen winter river curves over stone, a wild perpetual voice.