Jean Sprackland

I Borneo, 1951. Deep in the interior, on the deep jungle floor, a young missionary is kneeling

not in prayer, but in the equally experimental service of edging a spatula into the earth and collecting a few rich crumbs for the vial.

He has gone, as the letter said he should, far from the beaten track. He has left the village and walked for four hours to this small clearing

where the forest...

Nine o’clock on a winter morning. I crunched my way through sand-dunes hardened and sheened with frost, then slithered over a sheet of ice. Under the ice, pale bubbles swelled and skittered away from my tread. The tideline was a sparkling white ribbon of frozen froth, curling away into the distance. I stopped to watch oystercatchers pecking at a frozen pool. I visited a shipwreck, its...

Want to learn the source, the cool under the surface fire? Watch the heron:

he snatches the silver voice from the throat of the river and swallows it live.

How quick the water heals and speaks again, how many darting notes among the reeds.

Follow with your rod and line, tear a wound and drag out an echo.

Take home your hoard of silver. Run a blade along the seam of the belly,

spill the...

The lake had been drained that night and filled with sky instead.

We stood on the jetty as if on a summit, looking down on a fathomless depth of cloud.

Sky overhead, sky at our feet

like deep past and deep future

and we stood halfway between.

It was one ten in the morning. I can’t remember who stood there with me.

Its green complacency makes him cruel. He tramps the shoreline,...

When the wind collapses at last the sand glitters with oil like the fine mist of blood a dying man would breathe onto his friend’s face and shirt.

It’s this freak weather. For five days and five nights the storm hacked the steel legs, mauled the derricks. The pipes flailed and shuddered. Nothing the men could do but play blackjack and drink the rig dry.

He has his friend by the...