Ngalyod Refracted

Thanks.  It seems to me that we should be "civilised" enough to accept other ways of life besides our own, especially ones that existed pretty much unchanged for about 40,000 years before we even knew about them.  All people living in a nation should be subject to the same basic laws and have the same access to things a nation has a responsibility to provide to its citizens, eg legal representation, health care and education.  Aside from those things, the "nation" should step the hell away and allow people to believe whatever they choose, whether it's mainstream religion, traditional land-based mythology or midnight worship of the great lizard-wombat hybrid Merv.  A little bit more effort -- on ALL sides -- and maybe we'll eventually come up with a model that works for everyone.  Or maybe we'll migrate to Saturn when that little side project of mine comes to fruition...

Most yanks are dipshits, especially if they come from Texas.  But as far as the poem goes, very nice on the surface.  Which is all I have time to look at right now. But surfaces and well-built structure are pretty damn essential to poetry. I'll be back to take a deeper ponder later.  On first impression though, beautiful poem.

Thanks.  I don't want to seem rude but I really don't want to explain anything about this -- perhaps it helps to know a little about the history of Australia and the story of the Rainbow Serpent (Ngalyod).

Colour and exotic imagery give this a strong visual appeal. It has that sense of the primitive, the mythological not just by dint of subject-matter but in the primary stark language.

The compounds add to this effect - "hide-sheltered", "sorry-specked", rain-washed - and the staccato syntactic inversions of such phrases as "Long time come" and "Long time past".

It leaves a wonderful hot-coloured aftermath in the mind of rainbow streaked parrots and hot wing-beating skies...Very nice on a dull dank October day!...Rgds., Alan.

 Hey now, not all of us that come from Texas are dipshits. I got a good edumacation.

Leanne: I refrained from posting anything because I hate leaving comments that just say "this is awesome", so instead I will say - I am jealous of you. Utterly and completely. I'll frame this above my bed so that I might remember what poetry is.

forced headwaters fast and strong, a million ripples to the billabong,

trapped in edgewaters calming dead end, a rivers course, a newly made

bend, listen not to the lone star state, yapping yanks, wagging tales fate

come along instead to oxbow lake, at kakadu park lunch we`ll take!

wonderful poem and  imagery very nice, as most of yours (that ive read)

tend to be

Much of the poetry based on mythology/ancient history I've read is either implausibly romaticised or tediously didactic. This piece concentrates on perspective and imagery, so a win-win scene for me.

S3 is a smilefest conquest, and I like the dialectal variation on the familiar 'feet on ground/head in clouds' dichotomy.

S2; 'hide-sheltered feet deaf' and 'rain-washed parrots build you with their wings' typify, for me, the wealth of descriptive language enjoyed by communities 'suffering' privation in terms of instant message/graphic transmission mode; I imagine linguistic economy and packaged vocabulary underlie symptoms such as redundancy-laden poetry --
simulation v stimulation? [insert yawn metaphor here]

I read the last stanza (and particularly the last line) as a picture illustrating the text of Leanne's first comment above.

Unfortunately, I did find one glaring omission [laura's contradiction for the day]. This should have been written in a gaudy ferrous-coloured font with exaggerated serif, if only to provide some grounds for complaint, by distracting from the luxurious, elemental hues with which the poetry is infused. I first read this a while ago -- now that I've ingested and digested, I understand your occasional orangey manifestations.