Language lesson

Language Lesson

Most days his class teaches him bush language:
the track of goanna, the following of native bees,
which bits of flying fox are best to barbecue -
today, because it is hot they are letting him
earn his keep teaching them English. The syllabus
suggests verb forms, as if their mastery
could give back something to these dispossessed.
Patiently they listen, their dark eyes clouded
by the complex mystery of the usurping tongue:
"I sit; I am sitting," he says, and writes it up
with a stub of rationed chalk for them to copy,
"Now you write some." Their heads bow over the page.

He watches them as their pencils slowly scratch:
the ringer from Brunette Downs who twice a year
drank his cheques in a whirlwind week of booze,
but last year tried to unscrew a copper's head;
the courteous elder who killed his promised bride
by drowning her, for her taste for younger men;
the burly youths from Groote and Gove for whom
imprisonment is a rite of passage. Sometimes, as now,
he feels nervous and alien, preparing to feign
indifference to: "I rob, I am robbing; I lie, I am lying."
But one black diffident hand goes up half-way
to volunteer: "I dream, I dreaming; I cry, I crying."