HIC SUNT DRACONES

We do not exist, we New Zealanders, we Australians.

To believe us is heresy, by papal fiat

ex cathedra we are not: Pope Zachary (prone to meddling

in Merovingia and theological hot takes)

wrote in a letter to Saint Boniface that there couldn’t

be an Antipodes, another Earth

beneath the Earth.

That was twelve centuries ago; someone tell the Aborigines.

Supposed Papal Infallibility leaves the Nuncios

in Wellington and Canberra something of a problem.

Eppur si muove!

Oh how we waved when Scipio orbited overhead dreaming

like the International Space Station.

Saint Augustine was similarly sceptical

that any Son of Adam or Daughter of Eve

could survive a crossing of Equatorial seas a-boil

to put the soles of our feet against the soles of theirs

and besides, how would we see Christ’s grand encore

if we couldn’t even see the Pole Star?

Lilith’s brood, perhaps, or Lucifer’s?

Perhaps the Dove, the Crown, the Altar and the Cross

in the firmament

were overcompensating.

We were very surprised to learn

when Dante popped out of a hole in the ground

that we were, in fact, Purgatory… And then that little English girl

Alice: Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand? Or Australia?

We have a plague of rabbits, none of them white.

Chrétien de Troyes says Arthur

was made our king before departing for Avalon.

Joseph Hall might have been slightly more accurate

satirically dividing our hemisphere into the human vices:

Moronia abuts Gluttony, Intoxication

borders the land of Viragos.

We’ve long been mirror of the world

where wives lie uppermost.

But here we are:

no bosom-eyed faces in our chests, no legs fused

into a giant foot to shade us in the torrid sun, not even

the vast unexplored prairies and cordilleras

of Terra Australis Incognito counterweight to Europe

preventing the world tumbling in space like a dreidel,

no golden Kingdom of Beach

no Maletur, nor Locah, no Region Psitacorum

loud with motley parrots, no Eendrachtsland,

no Regio Patalis migrated down from the Indus

no Java-le-Grande of sorcerers and spices, no Magellanica,

nor Tierra del Espíritu Santo roamed by Mastodons,

no cities of silver, no Lost Tribes of Israel,

just two small continents above water,

Australia and Antarctica, mostly barely habitable

and one submerged, Zealandia,

with an aesthetically-pleasing archipelago

doing its best to keep head above the brine.

But even that wasn’t enough,

there wasn’t even a hole in the Southern Pole

leading into whatever

tropical paradise of Neanderthals, Nazis, UFOs and

tyrannosauri you care to imagine.

Really we’ve been disappointing people for forever.