IN THE PRIMAEVAL FOREST

.
I SHALL CLOSE IN THE PRIMEVAL FOREST


I shall close, then, under Ferntrees
of the Primaeval Forest
Beyond Warburton,
back in the late eighteen nineties
When I lugged my full pack
walking out to the goldmines
Alone up The Yarra Track and into
that Ancient Quietness.


At day’s end I was brought up to
a foreshortened pause
By the hot hot day’s ever so slow,
uncool withdrawal;
Alone under the tall vertigo of Mountain Ash trees,
high and formal,
Down which their bark’s suit-tails curled,
curled in claws.


I camped at a derelict hut, a sort
of deserted mia-mia,
Right by water under speckle stars
framed high-up by trees;
And fell to my own tramp of the feet
that wouldn’t cease
in long wake-dreams, the mopoke owl-tolls
of ancient fire.


Night went weird as Walsh’s Creek
jumped its gurgles down
I went over and over the dreamless
moss-strewn log and boulder;
Knowing the undergrowth guarded something
in it’s shoulder
As sleep held back the still-peace
in a restless nightgown.


As if by the music of the creek
in accompanying the wind
My helplessness increased, my insignificance
grew louder.
That mopoke tore my soul to ashes,
reducing me to powder
As the giant trees lashed the stars
and the half-moon grinned.

I saw the Goliath trees, great Eucalyptus Regnans
queens and kings
Stand as Egyptian armies marched warhorses
out against the Persians;
Watched far off Babylon fall, saw Alexander
take Asia on Excursion
While this great Primeval forest merely danced
its sways and swings.


I saw first Sphinx stones laid, as the platypus
dived for fernroot worms
Watch as a few nomad Aramaeans far wander’d for
a distant place to be;
And Magellan up a tall ship’s crows nest, decry
land from waves high at sea
As I writhed of the jeopardy beneath it all -
though the earth stayed firm.


I woke at last to the diffuse sunrise of wren-scold
and butcher birdsong
As I re-launched my load to live or die, my feet
took the mountain track;
As the layered old land pried open, the primeval worlds
kept falling back
Black cockatoos watched me go, to the solemn
tolling of a Currawong.




1 June 2009 © Wayne David Knoll


Based on the ‘Reminiscences of The Upper Yarra’ by W. J. EWART, a Series commencing in the ‘Warburton Mail’ 24 august 1934 - reprinted in ‘Warburton Ways’ by Earle Parkinson, 1984