Hope

[Guest guest]

Namaste Listmembers,

 

Dear rbb,

I hope you enjoyed your visit to Australia, and come again.

Inland is still waiting for you.

I came across this poem in my readings by Alex Derwent Hope (born 1907).

 

Australia

 

A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey

In the field uniform of modern wars,

Darken her hill, those endless, outstretched paws

Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

 

They call her young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb is dry.

 

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

 

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: 'We live' but 'we survive',

A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

 

And her five cities, like five teeming sores,

Each drains her:a vast parasite robber-state

Where second-hand Europeans pullulate

Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

 

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home

>From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find

The Arabian desert of the human mind,

Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

 

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare

Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes

The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes

Which is called civilization over there.

 

To satisfy some astrological imput to this mail; I was not surprised to

find 'My Country' fell in the nakshatra of Uttarabhadra ruled by Saturn in

my pisces 8th house.(which also hosts natal Ketu in Revati). This land

Australia seems to embody Binah herself, and I commune with her as Great

Grandmother.

P.S. As a lovely Leonine rising I can catch how Mani 'sees' the big cat.

Lolling in the splintered shade of outback Australia, where a puff of dust

on the horizon heralds movement; and the magnitude of such sleepy sharp

awareness.

OM TAT SAT

Ann.