SONGLINES

 

Labyrinth of impossible pathways

Meandering across Australia

Singing the Aborigines home

Singing out the names of every

Bird, bee and tree

Singing rook and river

Singing you and me

Singing all the world

Into being.

 

A dreaming track

A path across the land

Or sometimes the sky

Creator-Beings dreaming

Songs, stories, dances, paintings

Petrosomatoglyphs on the land

Leaving huge footprints behind

Navigating vast distances

Through the parched interior

Language no barrier

Melodic contours in song

Passing over the land

Rhythmically beating out the jives

Where the spirits of unborn children

Sing to keep the land alive

 

Chatwin tells us how it was

The songlines stretching across the eons

People singing their lives into existence

Following signs their ancestors

Had tuned to perfection.

Their roads invisible to us

No traces we could follow

No marks we could discern

No bulldozer dented this terrain

No tarmac spread for…