Recently, June requested a read of another poem. This one is about a specific location - one which for aeons was the abode of aboriginal culture, before white people made their way to this place, and left their indelible stamp upon the region.
SHIFTING DESTINY
A world beloved in song-memory is visited, enveloped,
re-peopled until eventually the evidence
of its existence is reduced to a few traces
kept as myth; tradition; the keening hurt of generations.
Success Hill is such a place, where the stamp of change
has marked its contours. The shoulder of its hill
was defeated even as suburbs encroached upon its flanks.
A tall hill crests this place where water snake is born.
Try to imagine the place shorn of myth: the place exudes the myth.
A fecund place in sandy plain, the hill holds dominion
where water snakes. Before white man’s upheaval
when season’s time was slow, time was measured
on banks lapped immeasurably, a pleasure slowly born.
Waugal dream snake born in crook of river bend,
born in reeds and handed down through generations
of river bank dwellers, coming and going through passage of time.
The green of this passage is not hot jungle,
(bright or yellow green), rather muted, muddied swathes
of brown and countless olive spikes making needle-point tapestry,
the orange shock of seasonal display.
Finding a coastal plain where wind and waves dance
together relentlessly, move inland along sand ridges
to a joyous quiet – a river flowing between quiet banks;
the river so old in its traces it doesn’t buck or pull,
but flows serenely. The place is chosen for its fecundity,
its resource the water which shapes.
Who can recall the place where fresh springs run and gurgle?
Where water bursts joyously forth out of the hillside,
filtered sweet and potable by underground journey
to rush arms length down the scattered hillside,
meeting all at once the mother lode of water
in constant stream passing?
Who, after all, when the hill has been wiped
from living memory? The scene, so life-giving,
wiped and erased from the communal memory
for some purpose well-noted, but now forgotten.
The dreary refrain of short term gain
resounding as the explanation.
When worlds collide portentous change is the inheritance.
Calamitous, vigorous, permanent change
spreads new colour on the landscape.
We, the humanity of this place, pass
in ever-changing tide as the waters of the place
pass but remain; pass but remain;
flowing yet still; removing sand, but silting up.
We are the inheritors and the gatekeepers both.
We lament change as we live it; we persevere
and we presume to love a place, a time, a destiny.
Success filters our heart when we slow to the murmur
of a heartbeat, sit on the hill, and live it.
END
