AUSTRALIA

by David Whyte

The light has come to find you again, 

even on the far side of the waking world,

look inland and you catch the dark interior

core of what only looks like an empty 
centre,
look outward and you see the tidal run 

of ocean stretching forever from the shore 

on which you stand, above all and across both, 

newness and the unimaginably ancient, singing together, 

and then everywhere, light painted on light, in the sky,
on the ground and in the faces of those looking
not at you but through you, to the beckoning horizon, 

to the pale night of a southern sapphire sky,
or even beneath you, through the dust of the endless earth,

to the dream-time in the mind’s eye of what has happened
and what is about to happen, even in the crowded cities,
even on the endless coast, even in the beautiful interior
desolations that never grew a single tree, we feel it when we hear

the growing whisper of rain feeding the parched ground,

or in the inward growth that makes what has been hidden 

begin to show its face in the world, the unspoken sense, 

not of being free now, but the anticipation of being allowed
into something deeper, further, beyond our living in the everyday, 

into the beckoning endless land, into the blue-hilled horizon, 

into the oceans mounting roar, an unspoken and indescribable freedom
just about to happen, reaching for the fatal shore, we ride
the slow, curling, but never breaking wave of our longed for arrival.

...
'Australia' © David Whyte
2015 and 2016
Walking the Shore
 Byron Bay,
Australia, April 25th 2016


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