'Sun Downs And Seasons' By Kirli Saunders

Sun Downs and Seasons

The poem, ‘Sun Downs and Seasons’ was written by Kirli Saunders and is about trees, seas and seasons. This poem was chosen because of the productive use of imagery and repetition. It carries valuable information to custodians of the land and is understandable for people in Australia.

‘Sun Downs and Seasons’ is written by Kirli Saunders, who herself is a first-nation person. She is a Gunai woman, born in the Gundungurra country in New South Wales with ties to the Yuin Birpi and Gadigal people. She is a teacher, cultural consultant and artist. In 2020, she won the NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year Award and is an award-winning writer of poetry, children’s literature, essays, plays, pictures and prose. She wrote the book Bindi Kindred and many of her books have been celebrated by the President’s

It is set up in a messy structure to display the imagery, but still readable for the audience. The sentence “this is the time of lilly pillies plumping into (fullness)” in the first stanza has a bracket around it to represent the word that takes up the entire line, whereas the word “leaves” in the third stanza represents the line through the middle of a leaf. In the next sentence, the word “falling” has letters in a different line, making it look like the letters are actually falling down. On the next pages, the word “migration” is written with the letters spread out. This is because “migration” is when something moves away, so the letters are moving further away from each other. A few stanzas down, it says “deep roots”, showing the words going deeper down and two stanzas down, the lines say “even when the (-- removed HTML --) > *howls* and hauls”. The words “West Wind” represent the moving wind and “howls” represents the sound effects the wind makes. In the next sentence, it says “o~c~e~a~n”. The swirly lines in between each letter represent the waves of the