Lara - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: a scream that becomes a blessing

This poem starts with shock and ends in a kind of praise. Its central move is to take a jarring, almost violent encounter with a bird and let that moment open into a vision of how the country survives: not by constant plenty, but by quick, hard-earned bursts of life and repair. The galah appears Suddenly, inches away, filling the speaker’s world so completely that the scene feels both intimate and intrusive. Yet what begins as a splintered scream becomes the doorway to what the poem calls the lucky genius of the land—an intelligence of adaptation that belongs not to people alone, but to the whole place.

The galah at the glass: beauty, threat, and proximity

The first image is cinematic: grey and pink wings flared against a tinted glass sky. That tinted glass matters because it implies a barrier and a human-made frame—someone is behind a window, looking out. The bird’s body is huge only because it is so close, which turns ordinary wildlife into an overwhelming presence. The scream is called splintered, a word that suggests not just loudness but fracture—sound like broken wood or glass. So the poem begins in tension: the speaker is protected (glass), but also startled; the bird is vivid and beautiful, but arrives as disruption.

From alarm to hymn: the country’s “lightly timbered” mind

After the ellipsis, the tone lifts and widens into a sweeping catalogue: the lightly / timbered country, sweet water plains, old camps, dry rivers, salt lakes. The list feels like the speaker is naming stations in memory, but it also reads as an argument: this place is defined by spareness and distance, yet it has a genius—a knack for making do. The phrase old camps quietly brings human history into the landscape, but without sentimentality; these are not romantic ruins so much as signs that people have had to live with the same dry cycles the poem keeps returning to. The galah’s scream, then, is not only a scare. It’s a reminder that the land speaks abruptly, in flashes.

“Morning mend[s] the fences / of the sun”: repair in a harsh light

One of the poem’s strangest, richest gestures is the way it makes weather into a kind of labor. the long dew / days of morning don’t just glisten; they mend the fences / of the sun. That metaphor holds a contradiction: the sun doesn’t need fences, and fences don’t belong to light. But in a dry country, the sun can feel like an uncontained force—relentless, boundaryless—while dew is a brief, restorative counterspell. To say morning mend[s] is to claim that the day begins with repair, not with depletion. The poem’s hope is specific and physical: not grand salvation, but tiny maintenance jobs performed by moisture and time.

Abundance that won’t last: tracks, scribbles, and “ephemeral” plenty

The final movement turns to motion and searching: tracks lead to sudden and ephemeral abundance. Abundance is real, but it’s unstable—here and then gone. Even the horizon is described as a pencil scribble, as if the landscape is sketched lightly, erasable, always being redrawn by season and weather. The speaker doesn’t promise permanence; instead they speak of places to seek a new season’s / pattern of rain / and seed. That phrasing makes survival an act of reading: you watch for patterns, you interpret signs, you move. And the poem refuses to sentimentalize drought; it ends on a / dry land, insisting that the beauty it’s praising is inseparable from hardship.

The sharp question the poem leaves hanging

If abundance is always ephemeral, what counts as possession at all—what can anyone really claim to own in a place where rain writes and erases the map? The poem’s answer seems to be that the only lasting thing is the practice of attention: noticing the galah inches away, noticing dew as repair, and learning the land’s brief, exact invitations to grow.