reese north

CHANGING FORMS
         Inspired by Bill Iden, 1928-2002            

A fallen river tree floated away from land
fat with loam, and green.
Sculpted by hands of the moon
(which are the colours of stars and as strong as stone)
it turned into a driftwood skeleton.
Tides that rise and wane and rise again
flung it onto shores that shift and change
like wind around a sculptor's hands

On the shore an age'd man gazed
at the ripples in changing forms,
he sighed for worlds he'd never know, and cried:
'I go to join an Ageless sea!'

A BIRD                   
        Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,                  
            And no birds sing.     Keats        
        'It's a place where many of my people were massacred.        
        It's in a valley where the birds don't sing.'     A tribal Elder           

The trees outside my window are twisting in the wind.
Beyond Sugaloaf's distant peak I know the angry land
that stretches all the way to Weipa and west across to Broome.
I've seen her dying rivers and dustbowls that once were green.

It's strange to think of all the people I met along the way;
their hopes, their moods, the fires we shared
with the blaze of desert stars.

On the open plains of the Nullabor
I smoked with the brown-skin people.
They told me of a bird that had followed me from Broome:
"It's Birrik. Spirit, see you safe to your home."
In the evening they sang their songs,
by the morning they were gone
like shimmers off the sand in the midday sun.

Behind the walls of the Grampians I saw
the ruins of a stone-hut village.
Fish traps clung to the floor of a creek
that swelled and emptied with the changing seasons.
When the moon came up I heard
the rhythm of pounding feet;
smelled odours of oil and sweat.
Ceremonial rings scored the earth
where tribes had celebrated origin and birth.
There was gratitude here.

In the cold grey of a wet autumn morning
the wind roused me from my dreams.
Aromas of decay rose off a stream
in the valley where the birds didn't sing.
I walked through mist to the heart of silence;
an Elder said "Remember this day."
Back on the Hume I knew freedom:
I'd learned what the land had to say.

A bird is perched on the bough of a tree
outside my window. It waits for me.

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