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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