Wilpena Dawn
Pat Drummond
(note: no audio track)
For those who shared it with me.
John Stephas, Greg Crispo, Cindy Budai, Theo Niessen, Ron Drummond
and Lynette and Keith Rasheed
Dateline Wilpena Pound, Flinders Ranges, S.A.

Silver Stars above Wilpena; moon-drenched mountains touch the morn;
Upturned hands that hold the heavens cradle the approaching dawn;
Beyond The Pound, the falling full moon
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 pale stars to flight.
One high solitary cloudling, grey to gold above me now is,
dancing on the mountain's brow and there upon its puppet strings.
Crimson lorikeets and falcons, soar above these vaults of Vulcan,
ring-necked parrots flash a welcome semaphore of rainbow wings.

Six hundred million years of Sandstone, ironstone, quartzite, shale and Lime.
in one vast, faulted, grand ambition driven back by space and time.
And here we, too, were driven back
through history of human pride
for grander hopes and dreams than mine
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 grant acceptance and forgiveness and grant us beauty at the last.

Chess Set Homepage / The Age Of Dissent / The Descent Of Age

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