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Mt Yengo in NSW is its
'centre', as Uluru (Ayers Rock) is the
Twist after turn over rutted track cracked warnings cross the leading line. All roads go to Yengo.
On blackened trunks from the latest burning scabs flake off like tattered bandage, shaded from relentless sun by childlike strips of green: the rolling grey gums of the Great Divide.
Past Wollombi the Abos hold their boree. Handprints in the cave hold back my passing.
Everything hidden watches. Even the road itself dives into shadow. Funnel-web spider, Eastern brown snake, red-bellied black, even the prickling scrub - all point a poisoning finger. Only this lone King parrot mocks and plays the jester.
Sun touches the horizon and on the slab of sandstone where I crouch the carving leaps out and confronts me: Baimie's footsteps stride from peak to peak. All roads lead to Yengo.
Ancestral instincts, and the confrontation of my own unknowing make me make the journey. Uninitiated, I lift my head and look straight at the holy mountain.
Baimie sees me and in the rustling of the dry green leaves I hear the wind begin to hum, the mounting rhythm of a million cicadas, the slipping of a thousand snakes, and in the penetrating sunset glare all the marks of my secret scars stand up and block my blessing.
Hilary Elfick
Published in author’s
collection Bush Track, Guildford Poets Press,
They say that Adam first drew breath in Africa
and certain I have seen his garden hung with mango, coffee, maize, and watched the stalks of millet bow and curl before the wind. And through the shades of vast savannah I have seen the herds and flocks that once he named - the elephant and vervet, and the shy low squirrel and the porcupine.
I never saw the serpent
but I did see the path where he has wormed and left his spittle on the puffy cheek of dying child and scoured away a young girl’s fertile time. And here’s a man who hoes his field until he slims with falling sickness quiet into his furrow, and here’s a granddad that has lain neglected these wet months upon a foetid sheet. And there’s a maid whose belly swells with child who will not last his first full year, and here’s a youth whose every knot and tuft of hair have dropped to show the snake’s imprinted skin.
Go forth and multiply? The sap still surges when the sun has fallen. We say that man acquires his own deficiency; we call our kind a syndrome.
And we, who make such careless jibes from our thin quarantine, what can we bring into these meadows washed with heavy rain, along these red roads, scarred and pitted with the blood that runs in Africa? What pills, what powders, what fine potions can we root to cover up the dribble of his passing?
Through touch of mist I see this nation’s colours stretch across the sky in bow that pales and leeches into dusk. In these green blades close by the path I see the sullen clots that slump and catch the evening light against a prison hut where this old warder’s wife is hunching in her flux, tongue stiffened in its yellow coat, where hard beams of an equatorial noon scorched eyes that fleck and flinch and cannot cry.
What parody of Eden’s this dark hut where child, whose mouth swells too grotesque to close, lies trembling in a pulse that pounds two hundred beats a minute? What God can we now walk beside at twilight unless we first have washed him in his fraying blanket caked with waste, as once again we watch him twist and wait to die?
But this was where first breathed a man. That is what, at last, will burst the heart. And still the pineapples are ripening in the fields.
Fish caught only in sniffed larch leaves and old dry ashes of the smokery. The sweet birch of my canoe. Forests frosted into silhouette. I need a longer line.
Under this water lies Vaskayla with Tunturi, her lover, whose boat capsized as she gave birth. It is skimmed flat for the geese to land. It is my silk road to the caves of Tottijarvi.
I clip up my parka and my sealskin boots, tug mittens woven from an eider’s breast. The dacha’s shuttered (now the earth has leaned) under its cap of thatched birch broom where smoke seeps through. Lit by the half door my knotted rug the colour of July and lichen berries. In the shadows a new bed frame spread with furs.
There is no silence here. Even when the wind drops I can hear pine needles touch the ground. I can hear the chough stretch his wings. I can hear the hinges of my eyelids.
Intrusive then the plash of paddles. He has come to bring me wine. I said there was no need.
The chough is watching from the roof’s edge still alert with jealous spite.
Seemed still, and always there. Masked maybe. For who could tell what moved behind that steady smile, That well-set jaw, those actions done correctly?
And when you saw at last what seemed like wrinkles Only were dried tear-beds, and that the smile, Too set, too held, too frozen, had broken at last
In baffling splinters and a cataract That dashed your peace, and plundered All that, till then, had seemed like harvest
And spun in whirlpools all that fragile web You thought would hold, however fortune struck it, And left you weeping, pleading, in its tumult
Why then you turned, and in your turning Looked. And maybe saw. For O She was not stone, nor ever is,
Nor ever will be, once you know That dams are only made of stone; It is their heart, the water that they hold
That makes them what they really are.
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