If I had grown up on Magnetic Island

I might’ve been friends with Julian Assange
Tom Sawyered with him from bay to bay—
Picnic, Radical and Horseshoe—for play
in bikini bottoms and feet bare in the sand
we’d eat fish and crawl through caves
at the forts we’d climb rocks and trees
where possums and koalas hide and sleep.

Puberty would rise like a placid moon
we’d paddle the waves, ride the storms
laugh with cockatoos, hide from magpies.
I’d go to school on the mainland
he’d play computer geek at home
drifting apart, and like Walt Whitman
we’d ebb with the ocean of life.