Robert Adamson - Green Prawn Map lyrics

in memory of my grandfather H.T. Adamson Morning before sunrise, sheets of dark air hang from nowhere in the sky. No stars there, only here is river. His line threads through a berley trail, a thread his life. There's no wind in the world and darkness is a smell alive with itself. He flicks a torch, a paper map Hawkesbury River & District damp, opened out. No sound but a black chuckle as fingers turn the limp page. Memory tracks its fragments, its thousand winds, shoals and creeks, collapsed shacks a white gap, mudflats – web over web lace-ball in brain's meridian. This paper's no map, what are its lines as flashlight conjures a code from a page of light, a spider's a total blank? So he steers upstream now away from map-reason, no direction to take but hands and boat to the place where he will k** prawns, mesh and scoop in creek and bay and take his bait kicking green out from this translucent morning Flint & Steel shines behind him, light comes in from everywhere, prawns are peeled alive. Set rods, tips curve along tide, the prawns howl into the breeze, marking the page. He's alone as he does this kind of work – his face hardened in sun, hands moving in and out of water and his life.