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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Online @ ECU Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language Volume 10 Issue 1 Landscapes: 'The Idea of North' Article 8 December 2020 After Rain Louise Boscacci University of Wollongong Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes Part of the Australian Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Boscacci, L. (2020). After Rain. Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, 10(1). Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol10/iss1/8 This Poetry is posted at Research Online. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol10/iss1/8 Boscacci: After Rain After Rain Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong, Australia) I When it rains the smell is not petrichor but charcoal, a musty sickness stuck to brittle ground. Underfoot and patient after that long trace Saturday calling up the blood moon, mobile networked ahead of all hotspot maps and embers of rage, your damp ghost, Fire, candles our shaky after-calm. II Shiver. III I heard the cuckoo-shrike Sunday, afternoon cloud sousing the scarp flat, black-faced Published by Research Online, 2020 1 Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, Vol. 10, Iss. 1 [2020], Art. 8 at birth, no silent evacuee smudged by carbon’s terror plume. Good Luck Bird, Molly Aura, Fortune-sifter, Greyscale Glider, Canopy Seer. Good luck, bird. IV Behind the over-cooked pot, umber water jar rent by heat in those early hours you slept unbroken with kiln free to run, leaf shards huddle where they dropped the night we ran once, twice, three times from fire’s arc. V Country of the faeries no more, flammagenitus bears dry dead thunder.1 Pyro-crickets underground queue after rain to resurface. —January 7, 2020. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/landscapes/vol10/iss1/8 2 Boscacci: After Rain Figure 1. The approaching Currowan-Morton fire front, as it crossed the Shoalhaven River to enter the Wingecaribbee district of the Illawarra (Southern) Highlands of New South Wales, 4 January 2020. This vantage point of watch and act was above the village of Fitzroy Falls, just out of sight below the water reservoir in the middle ground, in Wodi Wodi and Yuin country. (Photograph: Louise Boscacci). 1 A flammagenitus, from Cumulus flammagenitus, is a fire cloud commonly known as a pyrocumulus. The most intense version is a pyrocumulonimbus, capable of generating its own thunderstorm of lightning and black hail, and casting embers kilometres ahead to spark new blazes. (WMO, International Cloud Atlas, n.d., https://cloudatlas.wmo.int/en/flammagenitus.html). Published by Research Online, 2020 3