Cronulla Beach

By Jose Wendell P. Capilli

In Sydney’s Cronulla Beach, more than 5,000 white Australians descended on the sands,
attacking anybody who looked Middle Eastern or Asian. Revenge followed: Men of color
rampaged through Cronulla with baseball bats, smashing storefronts and windshields. Early
morning news, 12 December 2005.

Blood surges rapidly

Along Cronulla Beach.
Armed with bats,
White bodies are mad
Replications of tents,
Parasols and sunblinds
Spreading all over
What used to be kurranulla?
Aboriginal landscapes,
The place of pink seashells.
There is no chieftain
On the shore, no starfish
Where dominion shatters.
Not too far behind,
Thugs and their hand
Maids constrict exquisite
Shades of perplexity
To keep generations
Pure and sterile.
Spaces beneath vestiges
Of hamlets from long ago
Have become driftwood,
Shells, cleavers of melting
Pots and succession.
They are swaying eerily
Translucent as postcards
Bereft of scintillating light
In the heated-up weather.
So racializing, this soap.

—Jose Wendell P. Capili