Poem 17 Understanding

​I read my poem, ‘Desert Piece’, recently (see below), to try to remember the young me.  The poem felt so sad and desolate, that I felt I needed to redress the balance and write a poem of hope.  After all, failure at twenty-one doesn’t have to mean failure for ever! Actually, it made me doubly determined to carve my way and to create a curriculum vitae that was, at least, interesting.
 
In the fifty plus years that have passed since 1968, I have had many successes and not a few failures, and have learnt that in life you win some and you lose some!  With this in mind, I thought that I would use the Australian outback as a theme once again and find a real positive in its mystery and its contrasts, its rain forest and its deserts, its mountains and plains, its drab and its colour, its wet and its dry. Australia is a continent of stark differences.  There is life in the dry centre, where logic says that there should be none.  Bush fires destroy everything, but they also prompt the germination of new growth in a regenerative cycle that has taken place regularly over millennia.  When the monsoon-like rains finally fall on the centre, following years of drought, there is life a-plenty in its wake.  After the flood the desert becomes a sea of wildflowers.
 
Recently, thanks to global warming, there has been an excess of fire and flood in Australia, often arriving unexpectedly and causing heartbreak and disaster for its inhabitants, human or otherwise.  Traditionally, life goes on.  For me, the outback will always be a country where triumph and disaster go hand in hand.  It is a land of extremes, where people, animals and vegetation just keep going, riding the onslaughts, living their lives, and delighting in their unique environment.  Surely that is an image of optimism and worth a poem!

​Dead Centre
 
There is hope in the centre,
in the dry, scorched desert,
In the dusty billabongs,
and ancient mountain ranges,
there is life.
Rustling creatures, powdered red,
commute with industry,
prowl with intensity,
living spirits of the dreamtime.
Too, there are men,
old as the hills,
who know their way,
purposeful, confident,
who share the outback sand,
in harmony.  Who understand.
And there are seeds.
Dusty seeds, underfoot and under belly,
waiting for the ten-year rain
to slake their thirst.
Inert they lie, alert,
suckled by the centre,
patient, parched and waiting,
for the warm wet wind of India
to spark a desert fire,
to flood the desert floor.
And soon, Sturt’s rose and suncap,
dandelion and marigold,
will blaze on damp sand,
and set the central sea aflame with flower,
raging and roaring like a blacksmith’s hearth,
as winter's silken waters ebb.