ABPA - Australian Bush Poets Association

My Bush Visions

I have these visions lately. I am working in the bush.
I am digging. I am sawing. I pull hard, I twist, I push.
Am I building a retaining wall? Protection from a fire?
The pile of dirt and mud around me's growing ever higher.

I'm engrossed in honest labour while the sun slants through the trees.
I'm caked in thick black topsoil from my ankles to my knees.
Lorikeets are screeching while an eagle circles high.
I'm feeling most productive, but I've no idea why.

A platypus is paddling in the creek below my fence.
I see such fragments clearly, but the centre makes no sense.
I don't know what I'm doing, yet the fellow in this dream
Perceives it all precisely. Things aren't always what they seem.

Perhaps I'm simply yearning to get off my chair at last,
To embrace an active future and cast off a passive past;
To leave behind the city with its concrete and its noise;
To stock a little shed with classic 'rural dweller' toys;

To feel the mud upon me while the wind whips through my hair;
To bury through hard work responsibility and care;
To cease the gypsy life and put down roots on solid earth;
To at last pay fair attention to my simple rights of birth.

I know this digging yokel is a future form of me.
His life is bare and simple, yet he's happy as can be.
The fantasy and fact perhaps, at last, one day will merge,
And I will get to sublimate this deep, primeval urge…

© Stephen Whiteside 23.04.2014

I can dig that.

Marty

Nice.

The other man's grass, eh Matt? Nicely done.

I wonder what we'd each be doing if life hadn't landed us where we are and we didn't have bills to pay? Stephen would obviously be in a little cottage in the bush smelling the trees and digging to China. There's still time Stephen...


Hey, now here's a thought.....maybe Stephen could do your job for your Matt


Heather

Thanks, Matt.