creative writing
The taipan's eye
To banish the dark night of the soul, as our culture is wont to do, is to condemn us, intrapsychically and societally, to the wastelands. A wasteland is like parts of the heavily salinated Murray-Darling basin, or the overgrazed marginal lands out west that have turned to desert: in a wasteland not much grows, and not much decays. The dark, however, teems with moist and living things, only hidden.
I know the dark. Do you?
I know dark old as those desert canyons,
chthonic as the centre of the taipan's eye,
dark tender black as skin.
Dark, I cry, how long?
A voice of night rain drifts through winter ironbarks.
I am, she says, the beginning.
I am, she says, the void.
I am fertile dark, a velvet dark,
restorative, transformative is my dark.
It hurts, I cry. And cry.
I am, she says, the inevitable.
And inevitably, I pass.
I birth the crescent moon, sap springs into bloom,
the baby's head crowns.
Silent germinative core am I.
Don't banish me, she says, or I will seed like
bitter ice in the marrow of your bones, and
there will come
the wasteland.
Candlemas 1 August 1997
Wild angels
The angels are singing: yes,
a celestial sound in the winds
but under that, feel it,
a roar.
The angels are chanting.
Their chthonic cries shudder down ancient
roots of the ironbark, swell through the gullies,
ring off the crags: hear the
thunder of old women's howls and
the growing of flesh onto bone.
The angels are singing to me.
They are holding me blessing me singing me
whole, a woman to woman song.
Worn hands with the scent of the soil and the bush
open my veins to the sun.
With a fiercest cunning and a tenderest crooning
they gather the bleeding parts.
They gather the broken bits.
They smudge the air with eucalypt, make sacred signs in dirt,
they do the work of the angels, a woman's work.
In vast blue skies of my body and winter winds,
angels sing me whole.
They sing me back into body.
Angels sing me my beauty.
Wild angels are singing to me.
1 July 1995
