Nungarrayi must have gone to the funeral.
She had flowers.
(Nungarrayi clasping orange plastic lilies
an elderly madonna.)
The photocopying teacher stabs at buttons.
Her friend waits with a book
fat with yawns.
I make tea with bore water
matured in an urn.
Powdered milk aged to flour.
Throw it out.
At the pension camp, people are sitting
on warm raked ground,
strolling among shadows
long with the promise of evening.
A cool wind skips around.
Nungarrayi is coming.
You wait.
I sit down.
You used to live here, eh?
Yuwa, I work for landcare now, collect seed.
A young woman picks up something
discarded since the last raking,
pulls it in half.
Pale green flesh,
firm like an unripe apricot.
Scrapes shiny black seeds into a lid.
Bush tomato.
Presents me with a brimming lid.
We talk about the coming of Nungarrayi:
she's on foot,
she should be here soon,
maybe she stopped,
maybe at this house, maybe that one.
She doesn't appear.
It's getting late for me to make camp.
You wait.
Finally,
See, there she is.
Look! Over there!
Nungarrayi,
this woman with whom I share
only handfuls of words,
gives me a bear hug,
accepts bush banana seedlings
with slight confusion -
there's plenty in the bush.
Yes, yes, she'll come seed-collecting tomorrow.
How many ladies?
Three. She sings them on her fingers:
Meeee, Pil-yar-eee, Dais-eee Nakamarraaa.
Somehow a mad Daisy
also comes
on our quest
into the sand country.
Look punkuna!
You can eat this now,
peeling big green seeds
out of pods.
No, not bushtucker.
I want ripe seeds,
for growing plants.
You don't want bushtucker?
Look, this one, bush banana,
good food ...
What about watiyawanu?
Suddenly the country is full of seeds,
neat bunches and tangles of pods;
others hang single and straight
like petrified rain.
That watiyawanu is still green, isn't it?
We take it back,
leave it a while. It be right.
They head off
barefoot around the spinifex,
keeping their distance
from the mad Daisy.
Further along rattly tracks,
we pick minytju, ripe crackly pods.
Can you clean them for me?
- separate out the seeds:
a racket of threshers and sieves
in whitefella technology.
One of the Daisies
plonks herself down
on the side of the track,
tips her bucket of seeds
into her ample lap,
crunches up the pods,
begins chanting,
raising and dropping her arms,
raising
handfuls of seed and chaff,
seed dropping into her lap,
chaff taken by the wind.
The other women
look at this Daisy,
drop to the ground,
pour their pods
into their ample or skinny laps,
chant,
raising and dropping their arms,
raising and dropping.
To my Sydney friend
it's the Catholic Womens' Guild,
singing hymns as they knit.
The miracle of pure brown seed
pours into my bucket.
