Later, it was hypothesised
my little sister had been lying in
the sun too long. There was
a local cricket game on,
and she was stomach-down,
fingerpainting paths of kikuyu
out near the boundary line.
My sense is shade
is not so much the objective
when you are really young;
you might be constantly parleyed
back to it by your mum,
but better
and more elastic things happen
beyond the crunching
corrugated eaves.
Proving unresponsive
to new moons of watermelon
was the last straw for me;
I walked out into the sun
and mirrored the way she lay
to see what was going on.
Her face, now a foaming red,
strayed here and there by hair
and grassy punctuation,
had found a world all of its own,
her features,
especially her mouth and nose,
plasticised by an unsupervised
experiment into gravity,
into Victorian contortion
as a kind of baseline form.
Her eyes, by and large, stayed closed,
but for a split second
(as death eyes often do)
they opened only for mine,
the body, probably unconsciously,
sending its last distress signal
by an accusing glare.

Judith Wright Poetry Prize (Runner up)
Supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation