Sunday Poetry for Australia

This beautiful paean of love and hope comes from David Whyte. Although he has dedicated the poem to Australia for its current trauma, I feel that we can all draw a great deal of wisdom and comfort for our own lives as we moves through the days and in our yearning to make sense of it all.

AUSTRALIA

The light has come to find you again, even on the far side
of the waking world, look inland and you catch the dark
interior core of what only looks like an empty centre,
look outward and you see the tidal run of ocean stretching
forever from the shore on which you stand, above all
and across both, newness and the unimaginably ancient,
singing together, and then everywhere, light painted on light,
in the sky, on the ground and in the faces of those looking
not at you but through you, to the beckoning horizon,
to the pale night of a southern sapphire sky, or even beneath you,
through the dust of the endless earth, to the dream-time
in the mind’s eye of what has happened and what is about
to happen, even in the crowded cities, even on the endless coast,
even in the beautiful interior desolations that never grew a single tree,
we feel it when we hear the growing whisper of rain feeding
the parched ground, or in the inward growth that makes
what has been hidden begin to show its face in the world,
the unspoken sense, not of being free now, but the anticipation
of being allowed into something deeper, further, beyond our living
in the everyday, into the beckoning endless land, into the blue-hilled
horizon, into the oceans mounting roar, an unspoken
and indescribable freedom just about to happen, reaching
for that fatal shore, we walk the edge of this waiting land,
riding forever, the slow, almost falling, but never breaking wave
of our longed-for arrival.