Unearthed Fire Lives By Burning
by Wayne David Knoll

In memory of Scholar and Christian Social Justice and Radical Discipleship Pioneer, Dr Athol Gill.


Bearded thinker: Coppola of the Gospel,
You gave us breathtaking bible
Discipleship with the damned
Community with a cooking pot
& mission with muscle of mind.

Your red blooded Jesus
spoke the veils of squeamishness
disarmed sure creeds of comfort
& conjured the wild man of God.

Nothing cheap about you
Not grace, not supermarket goods
You left profiteering for
The road of radical prophethood.

Let the supermarkets sellout, the churches burn!
Who can dodge the word which shakes our boots?

The manager has quit to be a man:
Living on costlier manna,
A Gospel not of speeches
But authentic life - letting go.

You broke the adage of the academic
Taught theology the trade of turning tables
& the tame churches quailed on their cushions.

Old-young Athol, Humble-to God Moses! Gentle Bunyip!
Blessed is the foot put down in loving justice
for the marriage of death and resurrection.

Twinkle-eyed Blues-man,
Rabbi of road metal faith
The unearthed fire lives by burning
And evening quail can cost an early grave.


First published and presented at the first anniversary of the death of Athol Gill at the community he founded, The House of The Gentle Bunyip in 1993. Written Jan 93. Also published in the biography of Athol Gill.

Psalm of the Sky

Unhatched egg of a rising moon
passes through
Wind surge on sky waves in breaking
cloud-seas,
Going into darkness behind thicket troughs,
it is born,
And born again, bringing a parcel of
intercepted light.

Glow crusts the aura about the skies moment
of substance,
Fleecing our gaseous geography with aureole silver,
flooding
Objects below with torches of basking white,
the luminary
Our servant guide up through the mapless
fleeting country.

I lie back in a descended water, with my
earthen view
Floating up (the reverse of arial), and look
out as if
Down to the depths of creation as it was
knocked out
And see the stars, the constellations gathered
round

Like puzzle games with dark spaces for mysteries
where
Making tales, the legends which gather highlights
of old story
In telling points, are bright fruit of an unpicked
higher tree
Glowing like last twinkles in eyes too far off
to see.

The sky is our widest screen: there, action
and stories
Play out at large, before and after cinemas,
bigger
Than television, the videos of space go back
and back
Iinto the shelves of eternal tales in
endlessness.

Whole mountain ranges are above me
as if below,
With saddles and ridges of ancient
gaseous thrust
Risen into the ether, fed on ozone
and atmosphere
A constant gallery of refreshed painting,
turning

An abstract of liquid gas into a physical touch
of art,
Brushes of life and death, a thought, sculpture,
painting
In ever changing possibility of exhibition,
free entry for all
Sky is a living pallete, the moving canvas
of a Master.

Wayne David Knoll © 6 Feb 2007 Alice Springs

The Land is a Quilt of Falling

The land is a quilt of falling dry pages, an earthen palette:

the inlaid chequerboard of its browned patchwork tapestry

is a Victorian quilt that passes under the sky in so many

inventions of brown: the russet tan, woodgrain and ochre;

the fired red, jaded orange, dusky sand and olive stone.

This earth is a floored mansion: a parquetry of inlaid wood.

This earth is a confetti marriage-scatter of autumn's pages.

And my continent-avowng plane-flight gives angel's vision

of a sky, an arc of the world, a land, a people needing change;

change in habit more than weather, thirst for a new season

where the quiltwork of human hands works the redeems

across warming beauty in sleep that wakes on another side.

Copywright. Wayne David Knoll, Jan 2007 Alice Springs,

(after a direct flight from Melbourne} 23 Jan 2007)

Everything Makes Sense - A Nonsense Poem
OR
After Family -in Jabbawockish

Ah Natch! Smoo
gestibell dah luff!
Kumnid lodz,
chuggle, keam, aha!

Ha! guggle klan,
Brothern doddle kin;
Wahshuditz sistern pa!
KakoMarsey! Teal, teal, teal.