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Monthly Verse

The flaw in the pattern

12 thoughts on wilderness, Overland Track, Tasmania – Day 5

  • 1. The deep blue bowl of sky, the microbial cities in the folds of my skin.
  • 2. Web, palimpsest, machine – nothing can capture it. All we can say is what it is not.
  • 3. Warping the laws of physics, time drifts with the continents and distance is measured by each species’ step.
  • 4. It is not untouched by us, yet finds us irrelevant.
  • 5. Here the leech and the midge are equal to the devil and quoll.
  • 6. To avoid sentences tangled with economic value and square acreage, the wild should be defined through non-human eyes, distilling its meaning to one simple word; essential.
  • 7. Stillness and death can be virtues.
  • 8. It keeps telling us the same thing yet never repeats itself.
  • 9. Memories are sketched with shadow, history scratched deep in the mountain’s bones.
  • 10. Solitude is a state of mind. You can never be alone.
  • 11. The only commandment is that all shall be connected.
  • 12. This is the home of a new genus of silence, a place where travel is tectonic grind, weather is never trivial and the present is the flaw in the pattern.

by Rachel Mead

 

Rachel Mead

Rachael Mead is a South Australian poet. She has been published in literary journals in Australia and internationally and is the author of three poetry collections: Sliding Down the Belly of the World (Wakefield Press 2012), The Sixth Creek (Picaro Press 2013) and The Quiet Blue World (Garron Publishing 2015).

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