Poetry by Yann Toussaint, writer from the Great Southern, Western Australia.
Commissioned by MIX Artists for the Refugium exhibition and read by Yann Toussaint at the exhibition opening. 

​Mapping Refugium (after Borges)
 
We chart a fragmented landscape
filled with red-listed relics
hiding in gullies, canyons,
caverns, canopies,
or clinging
to shrinking islands in time,
or to mountain tops
that are losing height
dispensing more elevated species
into over-heated air – like ash –
or else causing them to seek respite
amongst granite tors
protected by pockets of poison
by mosaics of fire, totems, increase sites,
by occasional foresight,
or oversight -  
lacunae in the long histories
of dispossession.
 
And it is in this landscape also
that we make our marks –
 
We bear witness
We curate hope
We follow threads
We sow seeds
We make nests
We rescue flotsam rafts
We write secular prayers
We do not throw stones.
 
Standing in this garden of braided paths
we too seek respite
attempting to stem, for a while at least,
that slow drift
 
And so we draw our lines
in books of shifting sands
 
Yet all the while we know
that to wholly map Refugium
 
would require us to stitch together
a sheet of paper as large as the world.

Red tails
 
From stag-headed sentinel trees
they fly with slow funereal wingbeats[1]
in geriatric assemblies.

Still they clatter
and clamour
raucously enough –
 
all bolt-cutter beaks
and high vermillion
a ragtag collection
 
of aging burlesques,
sooty chimney sweeps
and carnival clowns jostling
 
to be first in line at the wake,
to savour that final waltz.
 
 
 
A Gilbert’s potoroo contemplates the future
 
For well over one hundred years
we Gilbert’s potoroos took refuge
in John Gould’s etchings
 
shrouded a memory of ourselves
in the stretched skins
contained in the reliquaries of faraway museums
 
Yet, all the while, we were dining on truffles
with roman-nosed insouciance
amongst the unburnt sedges
 
and sword grass gullies
above Little Beach and Waterfall Beach
enjoying the salt spray and the moonrise
 
wreathed in the scrub birds’ noisy elegies
finding refuge in extinction’s shadow.
 

[1] Slater and Slater 1993 The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds p. 162