Strong Views


Give me ‘Strong Views’ - with clear vistas!
Long sweeps of sight over the land I’m in! Elect,
To be truly a Countryman, I know my country’s
places from within… up places with aspect.

So let me take bearings from a crow’s nest,
a hill, tower, mountaintop, any eyrie asserted;
to establish where from I’ve come and why,
else why I might have been diverted.

Then, to long survey the whole compass
of country: features, obstacles, a layout below
and so, finally, decide a route onward, so I
can head off strongly in the way I need to go.

Looking out beforehand for barrier: cliff, gorge,
scrub, forest, fences, beasts, rivers, section;
the hills, roads, paths, chasms, guarded areas,
pitfalls, defences, and so going with direction.

With a sense of the context, of why I am taking
this way, this point of view, a taking that brings
me, among possible ways of seeing things,
to being on arrival in the best shape of seeing things.

So my feet have read by step the letters which
colour in details as the way-story was detected,
- which the heightened foreseeing in the eyes
had already minded them to be expected.

For then my eyes have fallen in love with
my feet, where they cared, they take that rap;
[sorry for some I meet who surely come off
half-trekked inclinations with mischarted maps

Drawn from the low slopes, as if decided down
some schism, casual not thorough, with a picture
decided in their plans of a way ahead which
doesn’t square with actual dangers of the area

And so journey thinking it’s all relative, that
there's no need for strong views - a coin tossed
for anyone’s opinion is valid as anyone else’s -
Live and let live transposes as lose and get lost.]

For my time in the scrub taught me to trust the
elevated view, of one whose raised sights trace
a thorough-fare, who took time to look long and
hard for a way ahead from a good high place.

Strong views are horizontal balance lines of
sight in the soul that orient out from the middle
for the vertical horizon-traveller to level the true
magneticality in their own built-in compass needle.

Pilgrim I commend strong views. Strong views
that know the lie of the land hook the sky to navigate,
gripped by a good hold on that sense of direction
had with prior long judgements of pendulum weight.


by Wayne David Knoll © 2001

Gellibrand Hill, Tullamarine, Victoria