Nungarrayi must have gone to the funeral.

She had flowers.

(Nungarrayi clasping orange plastic lilies,

an elderly madonna.)

The photocopying teacher stabs at buttons.

Her friend waits with a book

fat with yawns.

I make tea with bore water

matured in an urn.

Powdered milk aged to flour.

Throw it out.

At the pension camp, people are sitting

on warm raked ground,

strolling among shadows

long with the promise of evening.

A cool wind skips around.

Nungarrayi is coming.

You wait.

I sit down.

You used to live here, eh?

Yuwa, I work for landcare now, collect seed.

A young woman picks up something

discarded since the last raking,

pulls it in half.

Pale green flesh,

firm like an unripe apricot.

Scrapes shiny black seeds into a lid.

Bush tomato.

Presents me with a brimming lid.

We talk about the coming of Nungarrayi:

she's on foot,

she should be here soon,

maybe she stopped,

maybe at this house, maybe that one.

She doesn't appear.

It's getting late for me to make camp.

You wait.

Finally,

See, there she is.

Look! Over there!

Nungarrayi,

this woman with whom I share

only handfuls of words,

gives me a bear hug,

accepts bush banana seedlings

with slight confusion -

there's plenty in the bush.

Yes, yes, she'll come seed-collecting tomorrow.

How many ladies?

Three. She sings them on her fingers:

Meeee, Pil-yar-eee, Dais-eee Nakamarraaa.

Somehow a mad Daisy

also comes

on our quest

into the sand country.

Look punkuna!

You can eat this now,

peeling big green seeds

out of pods.

No, not bushtucker.

I want ripe seeds,

for growing plants.

You don't want bushtucker?

Look, this one, bush banana,

good food...

What about watiyawanu?

Suddenly the country is full of seeds,

neat bunches and tangles of pods;

others hang single and straight

like petrified rain.

That watiyawanu is still green, isn't it?

We take it back,

leave it a while. It be right.

They head off

barefeet around the spinifex,

keeping their distance

from the mad Daisy.

Further along rattly tracks,

we pick minytju, ripe crackly pods.

Can you clean them for me?

- separate out the seeds:

a racket of threshers and sieves

in whitefella technology.

One of the Daisies

plonks herself down

on the side of the track,

tips her bucket of seeds

into her ample lap,

crunches up the pods,

begins chanting,

raising and dropping her arms,

raising

handfuls of seed and chaff,

seed dropping into her lap,

chaff taken by the wind.

The other women

look at this Daisy,

drop to the ground,

pour their pods

into their ample or skinny laps,

chant,

raising and dropping their arms,

raising and dropping.

To my Sydney friend

it's the Catholic Womens' Guild,

singing hymns as they knit.

The miracle of pure brown seed

pours into my bucket.