walking the songlines.

he walks along paths

sung into being by ancestors long dead

their chants forming

the shape of his lungs

the pattern of his footprints stretched out behind him

uttered syllables creating a chain

linking tone to tone

pulse to pulse

to one who came before

to all the ones who came before

to every thing that came before

and to all that will be brought into being

by the song he is singing

the soles of his feet

follow the trails his father's father sang out

each step painting his inner eyelids

with the sacred patterns

his totem reveals

and while he knows

intimately

where his path will take him

the tale of the journey remains a mystery

til journey's end welcomes him home

Author's Note

Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians, are an ancient cultural concept and motif perpetuated through oral lore and singing and other storytelling modalites such as dance and painting. Songlines are an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and subtle tracking mechanisms for navigation. Each songline has a particular direction or vector, and walking the wrong way along a songline may be sacreligious act, as at, for example, climbing up Uluru when the correct direction is down. For the Aborigine all land is sacred and alive. Their ancestors gave life in singing, gave them life through song, and dwell in the land still. The songs must be continually sung to keep the land "alive". In singing they preserve the land/story/dreaming of their ancestors, and recreate it in their oneness of past, present and future (pulled from Wikipedia - best description i could give)

Reviews

[R J Askew]

'uttering syllables creating a chain' is what it's all about and the breathing of a poem into life by performing it the key moment in it's genesis I think ... if a poem proves itself easy on the poet's lips it proves itself to be a proper job ... The 'came before' refrain is very effective. And I like the notion of all things being linked. There is an arrogance about the modern world of cities, as if we can exist removed from all that boring stuff that went before. A catastrophic way to be.

[anon]

Excellent poem jennie, i welcomed reading it again...

[The Flawed]

This is all very well, but what do they smell like?
Joking aside, it's a great piece, and I must admit that after reading your notes I had to go back and read the poem again, as I had a different take on it the first time round, I was thinking that there is a Buddhist theme in there,
But what do I know?
Well done