White stucco dreaming

Sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind Is early childhood and black humour White stucco dreaming And a black Labrador, An orange and black panel-van Called the ‘black-banana' With twenty blackfellas hanging out the back Blasting through the white stucco umbilical Of a working class tribe, Front yards studded with old black tyres That became mutant swans overnight Attacked with a cane-knife and a bad white paint job White stucco dreaming And snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror of Mum's scorn, Snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto white stucco, Temporarily blushing it pink Amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings And flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks That echoed through little black minds and sent the Labrador insane Chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud Laid across white stucco And mud cakes on the camp stove That just made Dad see black, No tree was ever safe from tree-house sprawl, And the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets, Peering into our white stucco cocoon, Wishing, they were with us . . .