If I Belong Here, How Did That Come To Be?
2008 - 2012
The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills, Forgotten Narratives. Edited Ian D. Clark and Fred Cahir CSIRO Publishing 2013
Robert O’Hara Burke
Summer is not a time for cultural superimposition
Bowl-shaped sky rolling over thick horizons
Caught between gulf and temperate country
Intense long hot flame days
Bitter cold nights, flickered warm light on camel and horse
In furnace draught the human heart projects no heat
Scraggly figures in gibber and sand
More than cultural blindness places them here
An experience too intense to bear for long
But trust in providence and classical thought
Whilst others live light, dark thoughts weigh heavy
Blood in veins flow slow, nostrils burn
False knowledge rises to the surface
Even with survival in sight, no matter the pledge
Bleached bones will tell the story, of Nardoo struggle
Caught between death and life with knowledge of one
Glory is gone, the imagined nirvana, lost
If you were here,in the tracks of the hapless
Coming in the skin of an outsider
With unnecessary tools though aplenty
In this place, at this time, how would you cope
Earth red inflame your soul without reprieve
It would be the same for you, same end
There would be nothing more to prop you
From time afar we know what they came for
This was not a prize to be had by stealth
Leave the trodden path and pay the price
Look behind you, see where you’ve come
A life, a path, a death.
Same as here, though shorter
The meaning is here, tragic as it feels
When complete death enters
Surely this had meaning, small meaning
If we could only be here to see the summary
I hope they get us right, because this is the place
An end in itself, far from the womb but not so far
The inland sea does not exist, a dry sandy sea
But place is now here
The same place as home
I can become this place
This place can become me
No matter which way I come from
Or which time I come from
This does not take sense, just sensibility
Because, the place is here before you
You learn the place the place does not learn you
Bring your curiosity, bring your baggage
Bow to the essence, pray to the primal
This is not a dead heart, the colour of soil and blood
There is life in the dead ancestors here, we are lucky
They cannot speak with us, we must learn from the knowers
Theirs is a language beyond life, beyond now
My rags are disintegrating, like my flesh
I cannot sense any flesh in the brittle dry
Even our words hang in the air
It is we, our bones
Who mark the end of this story
I breathe your dust you breathe mine
Our dust is our story
Let others despair, they breathe air
It is the flies that carry the flesh
Get them out of eyes and mouth
Let them become sand like the rest of us
It is the flies that make me irritable
I cannot laugh at flies
The river down there, the fire here
Far from what I thought mattered
Neither river nor fire care
If ours is a symbolic sacrifice
It is ours alone
Our bones shall become sand
They can bury our sand
Because we have forgotten the civilised
Not such a quiet place after all
Our thoughts only matter if found
There never was certainty
Equipment made us believe so
Do you remember the equipment
It made us do what we did
But at night it forgot it was we
It was we who carried it to new meaning
I have never seen a black flame
Can you see the black flame
It is not the flame of home
Death must not be ready yet
But we are surrounded by death
We must not feel special
Does no sound mean death
No sound moves over the sand
There are curious eyes for death
Coming from their smoky fires
A kindness they bring, at a distance
We are strange when alive
What must we be like near death
They still come
I don’t stop the wind now
It moves right through me
Face down in the sand
I have no energy for self reflection
And what a nonsense that would be anyway
To scrutinise myself like a stranger
Past masters look down on me
But soon I will look down on them
Or is it the kindly dark faces of my dream
Faces baked in clay, of the earth
I am not alarmed by them
I assumed I know them though not intimately
We are the same, we are not the other
They know that, maybe it is not too late for me
Suddenly I recognise them, can I proceed
The wind is again against me
My problem is I can’t see the line
What is now and what was then
There is no path to tread
Without comprehension I exclaim, this is easy
What is this absurd drama which hasn’t yet been invented
There is no concept driving this pattern
My uncertainty drives this pattern
If I pray, would it make a difference
No matter, I am home in unknown place
The future is here at last
Sung with another’s voice
My taste for salvation has gone
Yesterday was another world
These are not my words
These are the words of the eternal
My tongue does not speak, it is swollen
I have not been to this place
But this place claims me as it’s own
There is an essential piece of me somewhere else
But only words shall retrieve it
If not soon I shall belong to somewhere else
My body will follow my mind
And think ahead to new times and belongings
My death a royal gift, me the King
But these are warm thoughts and I am cold
These are thoughts with promise
But I taste no sweetness of future
I fall under my own weight of pulse
And the dark force knowledge re enters
Angry I rage at my own recklessness
Before laughing with a trickle of strength
Am I destined to cringe in shame at my human failure
The motives weren’t mine alone
But I shall be remembered
You once saw me as honourable, a fools vision
The stains on my shirt are not honour
They seep from my human self
Keep your vision and my spirit will live
Though don’t expect a valediction
I have gambled my last
Green Southern gardens would compliment inland red
Can they live side by side or do they need to let go of one another
Life cannot live with death, not with our lot anyway
It is just the way we see it
We need the other to position ourselves
This makes a long road to liberation
A long way to future love of country, of self
On my death sand I can feel attachment to place
The things place brings, wealth and security
I sought them myself
But they vanish at the touch
Becoming less important at each historical decade
Gone before they are realised
I am warm again
Warm in feeling
In this place
Without apparent connection
Will others share their genius
I wanted to share the future
But mine is to myth
Separated from the thing I once was
Ironically more a part of this place than those who survive me
Forgotten at home remembered here
Mine will be a strange remembrance
The hapless explorer lost at home
Home is the easiest place to be lost
If you do not have the knowledge
I cannot walk backwards to the place of knowing
That is before others
There will be much ado about our deaths
Many will duck and weave
You see, we were the instruments of others dreams as well
These men shall become forgotten, we will be antique ideas
This is our inheritance from place, a fortune you might say
To inherit we needed to be lost
That crow there, shoot it
Here is my pistol I cannot hand it to you
The fire still burns you can eat
Your dry coarse tongue will rasp the crow’s bones
One bang and you can live
Stay alive, tell our story, get it right
The fire still burns
Why is this so hard
The exploration was difficult but this is impossible
Is it easier to die with love
In the hands of love
Making dust from my shirt, between thumb and index finger
I still breathe air not dust
False notions of dark knowledge suggest a new chapter
Why then does this feel final
Realisation tells me this is so
While my mind is active tell me what you think
Share with me my own perceptions
Out with bragging, we have lost
Let our thoughts dance but not as an epitaph
As living words with future
Can those at the fires hear our words
Will we join their dead, or do we go to our own
Do I become part of their history, their place
It is getting dark we have no light to think
I thought our history was far away but now I am unsure
If I could sing, I would sing right now
A simple song of regret.
William John Wills
The limited cold knowledge I hold cannot be held for long,
in the strong Earth God presence of this place
How long would it take to know this God, me of Euclidean God
I thought I had no heart for hand of providence
Youthful blind trust I have had, in the charisma of man
In the impetuous energy of the glory moment
And yet behind this apparent trust lurks self doubt
Though not enough to commend me to God
If God is a place, then we are lost
More lost than our people in places of their making
It helps me, knowing you will at least remember
My energy skills and attributes spent in a year
A man not of God ought not to wish worship
Whilst my frailty brings clarity, it also brings fear
Unpropitious, not the dream of my childhood
Against the grain of all we discussed, son to father, boy to man, man to man
The smell of smoke to my left, near my feet
And thoughts of continuation occupy me for a moment
There seems plenty of time to wallow in a thought, strange
With so little time
I can see dark basalt in my mind’s eye, cool to touch,
Heavy and hard, unbothered by time
There is no depth and no surface to these thoughts
In a frayed life, from a time of care and learning
I cannot hear other men, other voices
No cries of recognition, or yelps of pain
No wail of arrival
No doubt, oppressed by the slow time of the present
Should I be anxious, if so about what
I can see through deception, more clearly than before
Or is that just the dawn light
There is no emotion in my feeble state
Cry I would if I could, dry and cold
I never considered myself powerful
Now I know, life is power itself
Where are the others, by the river
Drifting on life water to what destination
My quiet domestic dreams of glory, quietly held
Look at my toes, withered flowers
Not fit for glory
You will only know me as a young man
Only my bones will age my superficial thought
My skills brought us here with your regret
Gray buried already, our deaths synchronised
Though not yet known,
As we lifted burial mound rocks
A man of the sea to die in the desert
And what could we do, all so close
Our pasts could not carry us now
If we were philosophers, we would have stayed at home
Or come anyway, but understood why
Can I leave something behind, some wisdom
He had his charisma, I my algebraic mind
Beneath we were all terrified by the space
No respite from space, no where to hide
I think that is why Gray gave in
His torment my disgrace
And the blowing wind across the ripple river
Brings with it the sigh I feel
Though showing none of the heat fury we know is here
You told me not to live for regret, I obeyed
The sentiment of regret will not be seated at the fire of future place makers
So tell me, the direction from here, if you know
My future is your future though on your own
Because I am not the same man you farewelled and never will be
We were good, as father and son, equal minds
I had not imaged this as my destination
But now I am here I can see it clearly
It was here all along
But we were not acquainted
And now that we are, time shall slide
This is the perpetual journey
I can see the stars, through shadowed branches
Days, weeks, months ago I saw them as an objective observer
Reading their information in the language of man
Now they tell me what I need to know, in the language of the universe
My dry curled fingers, my almost visible bones
In life this would be an omen, in death an image
Too late for the felt terror
In the knowledge that life is present, but curiosity absent
My selfish curiosity was my strength
But what was my occupation within which I spent this strength
Explorer, barely a vocation, place was already here
We could not intersect with this place
At this time
We could not give to this place, this place took from us
Until we had nothing left to give
We ought not to have asked for so much
We got lost in the light, lost in time and space
We surrendered, but too late
Now I wait the moment, if it happens in a moment
This place takes more than the motivation we had to offer
Now we are conquered, thought and action inconsequential
After a conquest based on movement
Even movement is now of no consequence
A trace of consciousness all I have, my last left freedom
Any significance lost on us
© Paul Lambeth 2009