Wilpena Dawn

Wilpena Dawn

Words and Music- Pat Drummond

For those who shared it with me. John Stephas, Greg Crispo, Cindy Budai, Theo Niessen and Lynette and Keith Rasheed

Dateline Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges, S.A. - 9/8/98 5AM

Silver Stars above Wilpena; moon-drenched mountains touch the morn;

Upturned hands that hold the heavens cradle the approaching dawn;

Beyond The Pound, the full moon falls

and drags it's violet train of night;

toward the Gulf the golden dawn

star conjures up the crimson light.

Waves of misty mountains frozen, memories of ancient oceans;

wearing down two titan domes and measuring their fall in weeks;

Lines of inland breakers roaring; on those long forgotten mornings

swirling through the primal dawning, smashing on Saint Mary's peak.

Now she comes; the Blood Red Mother, spilling ochre on the shale;

Silver-green springs from the darkness. Blue, so infinitely pale;

comes rising from the roseate rim,

in fragile shards of splintered light

that frame the sacred sandstone ring

and puts the last white stars to flight.

One high solitary cloudling, grey to gold above me now is,

dancing on the mountains brow and there upon it's puppet strings.

Crimson lorikeets and falcons, soar above these vaults of Vulcan,

ring-necked parrots shout their welcome semaphore of rainbow wings.

Six hundred million years of sandstone, ironstone, quartzite, shale and lime.

One vast, faulted, grand ambition beaten back by space and time.

And here we, too, were beaten down

through history of human pride

for grander hopes and dreams than ours

have sought to prosper here and died

Here they came through Summer's heat, to grow the wool and sow the wheat,

Such bitter harvests here were reaped; through fire, flood, and drought on drought.

The Merediths, The Blacks and Truans; all their hard-won work in ruins;

All, at times, were winning through and all, in time, were driven out.

And now where people lived and died their derelict forgotten farms,

lie silent underneath a sky of spinifex and cocos palms,

While, wrought from ancient earthern crusts,

these pale horizons held on high,

raise ramparts where Wilpena thrusts

it's primal dreaming to the sky.

And as I sit and gaze upon this gentle vision held aloft,

I wonder how a land so harsh, at times like these can seem so soft.

Perhaps the Flinders Range reminds me, with the swift descent of age

that trouble, tears and toil, in time may wear away the soul enraged.

And, rubbing at our roughened edges, polishing the pain long past

May bring acceptance and forgiveness, granting beauty at the last.