My friend, Raj, threw me the word, benign. I also happened to visit the Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland and so I combined the two and created a poem.
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| That's me wading through the clear waters of the Eli Creek on Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast in Australia |
Fraser Island
The striated wood of the Satinay,
The timber that 'built the Suez',
Felled by the thousands,
On sandy Fraser Island.
The grand old ferns,
Their ancient memories,
Crushed under the feet,
Of a thousand lumberjacks.
It all started in 1863,
When came the 'Yankee Jack',
Welcomed by this benign land,
Who'd know what he'd take back?
The saws killed a forest,
That had seen a thousand fires,
Then came the miners,
To dig the sands up.
The natives got worried,
“What more do they lack?”
A paradise ruined,
A forest they'd never get back.
Finally the government
Realised it's all bad,
“Enough of logging,
Let the forest grow back!”
And so the forest stands,
On dunes of sand,
In the middle of the ocean,
A paradise, once again.
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