Wonnangatta Kneelscape

After breaking my leg far down the Moroka Gorge in the upper Wonnagatta Valley in Alpine Victorian wilderness, and then taking 22 hours to walk the 7 kilometres to get out, on bush crutches, hand-made with the help of my champion sons January 2001


East, a dawn-over sun bursts like candle spotlights
from smokescreens of a charcoal cloudstorm
each unclouded sunray beams its pauper’s gold

with wide music in the varnish of cinematone film
to overawe my ironclad warrior brows and screen-
test the powers of us sweated, here now enduring

this bushed-hot Wonnangatta of Australia. Lit clear,
it descends from God’zone country where the stain-
glass river gorges spill down ancient Moroka’s places,

for paradise falls to break and fall again, as the blue
white water unwinds on redstone and cascades splash
through holy fonts toward us from the stone-domed

mountain-villa, boulders in a Shed of Vision, a watershed
towards which I break a limb, literally, my God! the bush-
crutches support me, cut at my knees, I’m learning to walk

from the sky-down. I am ground up where a One goes
the wallaby trackwinds of holy wilderness, elation beyond
the pain is trod before painstaking itch of peaceless feet

in the bitter-solace of this stainlit sacristy
candled in soft yellow altarlight on scree
to and from which redcarpet runners chequer

the trace of Christ’s mass, a step-up sacrament,
on sweeps in untrammelled expansiveness, a vast
way-paved settlement in or out of offwhite marble,

that I, pained, diamond-rough, trip upon, to a settled
content in parrot-hued welcome, in dust and gravel,
cool as a dip of cucumber, warm as wafers,

the leaf solace of matter unstable that slakes
appetite, in the place of my hot so-fallible
flesh moving on in broken ginger.

9 Feb ~ 4 June 2001 © Wayne David Knoll

- a compnaion poem to 'Each Step' see this Blog - entry of 18 Feb 2007