Dull would they be of soul

Who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty?

[700verses]

When you see the subsiding sun

lip and slip the west’s salty hip

only those who have not kissed

will not move their tongue

and remember.

Only those who have not lost

will turn away before that

last ecstatic slide

has taken this night’s last light.

Bruce Pascoe - Saturday August 26 Figueria da Foz

[700verses]

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

Uluru Statement from the Heart

[700verses]

[‘Corroboree Tree’ Richmond Park]

The descendants of the pioneer families, who claimed ownership of the town, said the Aboriginal was really not part of the town at all. Sure, they worked the dunny cart in the old days, carried the rubbish and swept the street. Furthermore, they said, the Aboriginal was dumped here by the pastoralists, because they refused to pay the black fella equal wages, even when it came in. Right on the edge of someone else’s town didn’t they? Dumped the lot of them without any sign of lock, stock or barrel.

Alexis Wright - Carpentaria

[700verses]

Mallets pound fence posts

in tune with the rifles

to mask massacre sites

Cattle will graze

sheep hooves will scatter

children’s bones

Wildflowers will not grow

where the bone powder

lies

Ali Cobby Eckermann - Wild flowers

[700verses]

Listen!  Can’t you hear country keeping its peoples’ memories beating strongly, everybody heard?  It’s the pulse of all our broken hearts crying for families lost in the war we keep having, the children we keeps losing.

Alexis Wright - Hey ancestor

https://indigenousx.com.au/alexis-wright-hey-ancestor/

[700verses]

First thing every dawn

Remember the dead, cry for them.

Softly at first her wail begins,

One by one as they wake and hear

Join in the cry, and the whole camp

Wails for the dead, the poor dead

Gone from here to the Dark Place:

Oodgeroo Noonuccal - Dawn wail for the dead

[700verses]

Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw or a season of steady rain.

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

[700verses]

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Virginia Woolf - To the lighthouse

[700verses]

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

[700verses]

Death marshalls up his armies round us now.

Their footsteps crowd too near.

Lock your warm hand above the chilling heart

and for a time I live without my fear.

Grope in the night to find me and embrace,

for the dark preludes of the drums begin,

and round us round the company of lovers,

death draws his cordons in

Judith Wright - Company of Lovers

[700verses]

It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and everything looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea, now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts

Jane Austen - Mansfield Park

[700verses]

At night he dream of angels. All day long

Their bright wings brush against him, till it seems

The world is Florence, Florence is the chapel,

And all the people in his world angelic.

Now is the marbled floor almost completed;

The shining walls and towers beyond the window,

The flowers falling through the air from heaven

Want not a brush-stroke.

Rosemary Dobson - Painter of Umbria

https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dobson-rosemary/poems/painter-of-umbria-0192038

[700verses]

For the question

That troubled you as you watched the reapers

And a poor woman following,

Gleaning the ears on the ground,

Why should I have grain and this woman none?

No satisfactory answer has been found.

Ruth Dallas - Clouds on the sea

[700verses]

Moving in mist down unfrequented pathways

Fingering fence-posts pricked and patterned with frost,

Look close - at the wavering, stayed now, coralline branches

The terrified feathers of frost frozen in ruffling

With a furling nimbus of air.

Rosemary Dobson - Moving in mist

[700verses]

The rain drums down like red ants,

each bouncing off my window.

The ants are in great pain

and they cry out as they hit

as if their little legs were only

stitched on and their heads pasted.

Anne Sexton - The fury of rain storms

[700verses]

Just once I knew what life was for.

In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;

walked there along the Charles River,

watched the lights copying themselves,

all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening

their mouths as wide as opera singers;

Anne Sexton - Just once

[700verses]

The earth was turning around the sun to which it had been assigned, indifferent to its cargo of destinationless passengers. How could one believe, under that infinitely tranquil sky, that those very passengers now had it within their power to transform the earth into a moon barren of life?

Simone de Beauvoir - The Mandarins