Terra nullius An Eco Poem James Cowan Cosmos Press
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Contents I. Descent 5
II. Harsh Music 13
III. O Pardes! 21
Well tree e same way, e work with you When you feelin’ tree e work with you -‐ Big Bill Neidjie, Bunidji Elder
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I. Descent There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: The earth is troubled by our presence Under its great canopy of leaves, shimmering After a downpour of acid rain. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Bees hum their futile cries whenever men Plough, sow, and harvest broad-‐acre fields Laid waste by pesticides & parasites. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: When rivers are clogged with green algae Caused by farmers hooked on fertilizers Wearing face-‐masks of potassium chloride. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Beaches are overwhelmed by millions of bottles Bearing corporate logos like medals, signaling Yet another victory over the environment. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Imprisoned in a plenum of coal dust , carbon Sends shafts of free radicals into the ozone layer Making martyrs out of its mutilated skin. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: The air we breathe struggles against toxicity Under a fog-‐cloud of fumes emitted from cars Trumpeting their glister as fetish objects.
There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Old cathedrals decaying in the wake of emptiness Recall choirs that were once a celebration Of endless oscillations of the numinous. No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: How the world shudders on its orbit, attacked By nuclear fission hotly streaming into the sea Along Fukushima Daiichi’s ravaged shoreline. Chernobyl! Three Mile Island! Sellerfield! Mexico City! Kashiwazaki! Idaho Falls! Lucens! Leningrad! Waterford! Not to mention another Ninety meltdown accidents, on ships as well. An end to it, yes: when the atom is assaulted By zealous scientists indifferent to its fragility, Believing it to be just another equation fraught With absolutes that need to be disassembled. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Cry of a universe in pain, planets and asteroids Fearful of their desecration at the hands of Space shuttles ferrying tourists in their direction. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Woe to those who shrug at climate change Sassy junkies drunk on economics, a plethora of jobs, Their maws dripping with the obscenities of wealth. They eat themselves, cannibals all of them Who thrive on the flesh of old-‐growth forests Tropical sea-‐grasses, & our ancestors’ myths Lying broken in a valley raddled by shot-‐lines.
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There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Deepwater Horizon’s rig belching oil and flames Into the Gulf of Mexico, a monument to safety In the glassy offices of British Petroleum. Ah, that’s no end to it, when men in tailored suits Tell you they’re managing disaster with a cocktail Of lies spawned in their R & D departments Where evil’s euphemism is a buttoned-‐down smile. No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: schools of fish Bloated on beaches, sea-‐birds oil-‐smeared As they sink into the slime of everyman’s hunger For energy to fuel their insatiable restlessness. Oil alcoholics! One more glass of octane To send them into orbit! Drunks, all of them Tottering down streets, binge-‐bedeviled by Fears of not getting to where they want to be.
There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Walking the backroads of their own benighted sky Men assume that they own it, that the cosmos Is real estate caught up in a gridlock of profit. Every fenceline is a latitude carving up the world Into some mean analysis of itself, a portion Of infinite space rendered as the droppings Of some poor animal fleeing imprisonment. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Cruelty is a byword of men’s incarceration Of creatures – chickens, cattle, pigs, fish in farms Zoos, & their crepuscular cabinets of night animals.
No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: When we parade our superfluity as a bonus To nature’s perceived ill-‐arrangement of itself -‐ Its wildness, its abandon in the face of chaos. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: The dark arteries of autobahns & freeways bleed us Of what is our birthplace in dirt, the seedy origin Of ourselves emerging from the primeval swamp. Yes, no end to it: amputating the past as if It were a limb, leprous in its disfigurement A broken statue lying amid ruins, Nefertiti’s Beauty buried in an el-‐Amarna back street. Whales hauled up ramps on mother ships Without recourse to the wails of agony That detonating harpoons orchestrate in the name Of science, dressed up as a delicacy in restaurants. There’s no end to that: to killing as an accouterment To being, to pleasuring ourselves amid furs Grown on mink farms or Arctic ice-‐flows Where seal cubs cavort in their own blood. There’s no end to it: to inhumanity as a bulwark Along which we saunter, gazing down at the enemy Which is nature massing at the gates. We hate Its embrace, because that love is unconditional. We hate it when El Nino withdraws its rains We hate it when tsunamis rise up & flood our cities We hate it when rough seas blast corniches Presided over by our penchant for proprietary strolls.
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We hate it when star clusters explode, raining down Space debris to create a pall of perpetual night. We hate it when the Good Lady turns her back Upon us, appalled at our lascivious glance.
We hate it because we hate ourselves, our slide Into secularism, the dark night of disbelief. We hate those who worship in mosques, in churches & temples, those in chapels kneeling on bended knee. We hate sacred books that speak of miracles We hate prayer wheels & simple pieties We hate the chant of monks & their prostrations Reminding us of what it is to be humble. We do not wish to be humble We do not wish to abase ourselves We do not wish to breathe in the divine breath Of the gods, enlivening us with their gifts. We’re happy when a stone remains a stone Not Shiva’s lingam, a totem, stele, or Pieta. We’re happy when bloodied Christ figures Surrender to abstraction above church altars. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: We’re exiled from the gods’ convivium, their Prophesies transcending the mundane, trying To articulate the heady void of the ineffable. There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: We’ve abandoned Being for the sake of The efficiency of clocks, sharpness of razor-‐blades & the comforting embrace of mortgage repayments.
No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: No angel lands on our balustrade, wings outspread Gazing at us in absence as it tries to determine Whether virginity is our sovereign birthright. No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: We become agitated & aggrieved by raw nature For giving up its benefits with such reluctance In the face of our truculent and lordly right. We’ve become things, yes, mere tax credits Our humanity reduced to information in ASIO files Our idiosyncrancies the stuff of market research Telling us what we should eat and drink. We are -‐ not even -‐ bees! tending our hive Of common goodness, the hexagonal strife Of insects dependent upon one another to store Honey, such sweetness! of the common life. No end to it, yes, & I’ll tell you why: Armageddon’s near, the armies of Gog & Magog Gather on the battlefield, their apocalypse Javelins of self-‐disgust pointing towards the sky. We are destroying ourselves! Our voice is the voice of ghouls! We cross River Styx in a leaky boat That we have already torpedoed! We argue with gravity Because it taunts us with limits! We despise rivers undammed! We prefer our water in bottles!
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We want our air conditioned! We hanker for feathers in eiderdowns! We enjoy deodorants that separate us From the odour of our bodies! We take the waters in spar retreats Saturated with opulence! We wear whitened teeth! We bare our souls in supermarkets!
We linger in the lassitude of ourselves! We worship Moloch, & sacrifice our children To its brass-‐studded beatitude in the hope Of drowning out their cries of anguish! We tremble before the street leopard Spotty with hunger and faeces! We burn in the pyres of poverty Hoping they will never consume us! Masticators! Fornicators! Agitators! Sucked down into whirlpool of share dividends & stock market reports! Holy is the dollar We inject into our veins for a quick fix!
There’s no end to it, & I’ll tell you why: Sex is no longer the drug of choice, no longer The ornament of our bodies! New opiates Pamper our senses with the delusion of bliss. Our entrails are gnawed by eagles, the fire-‐stealer Prometheus our model, hanging from a ledge Bound to a stake in the name of theft. Stealing From nature has become our middle name.
So we lie here, in the last malbowge of hell Rotting in our own excrement, citizens of Dis -‐ That city populated by gorgons pretending to be Felicitous politicians parading their convictions. Cocytus is where we live, drowning in a river Of wailing, our bodies scorched into submission By an unbridled sun. This is the end to it: The slow incineration of our wellbeing. We have become spiders eating our own kind Ulcerous life masquerading as blandishment. We walk with death, the death of ourselves As we contemplate the sins of the wolf. This is the end to it, the final concatenation Of our self-‐delusion and calumny. Nothing is left Save redemption at the cost of our lives Wrenched from the abyss of the earth’s illness.
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II. Harsh Music But there is a Vigil where the walker in the gardens Stands and wonders in the dark. -‐ David Gascoigne Nature has its ways, its language Spoken by old men on forest paths Who listen to birds. Such talk is a Sequence of verbs they translate Into inner action, those rituals of glory Dedicated to wildflowers & orchids, in A spread of rampant blossoms: yam songs. They’re the keepers of its ways, solitude Their solace in the depths of the forest. ~ I’ve heard their tales, the solidity Of their myths, seated under rice barns By rocky crags lined with skulls. Their talk Is the talk of rivers, the patina of rain On thatched roofs, the unarguable Remonstrations of nature as witness. They know its foibles, its rigor and repartee As it dallies with impecunious earth Whose seductions are the song of growth. ~ Talk to me, earth. Tell me about heavy metals You imbibe in the river below Ok Tedi mine. Talk to me about the sludge you vomit Onto riverbanks, estuaries, & floodplains. Tell me about factories that poison fish Along the Yangzi and Mississippi rivers After snow-‐melt, or the onrush of spring rains. These are wellsprings of putrification Destined for cancer wards and still births.
Listen. Nature is a prism of many hues Its colours a fragment of unity. We fracture it at our risk, do damage To the simple structures of its being. Gas fields in the Pilliger are the stuff Of nightmares, the release of Furies Into water tables and clean air. Tailing ponds at Jabiru ooze radiation Into the Dreaming trails of spirits.
~ Soothe her fears, they blanche the skin
Of grace. Pain is a wound in a tree Caused by axe fall or chain saw. Remember how oil slicks on the ocean Are like pus when a ship founders. Turtles caught in long-‐line nets simulate Ostraca in antiquity’s rubbish dumps: Beauty is disfigured, its broken limbs Clutching at the emptiness of life. ~ Whispers. No one hears nature until It decides to destroy us. Hurricanes Volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, droughts & blizzards, the howl of winds Combine to disrupt our equilibrium. Nature is a prankster, a circus clown When it comes to upending certitude As our crowning achievement. Its Diadem of thorns makes us indifferent. ~ I’ve entered caves where Dreaming spirits Once slept, their nightly vigils stick figures Illuminated by firelight on rock walls. Celestial dance of invisible forces Yearning to be set free. Nature’s repost
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To the muteness of being. They bury Themselves in my nocturnal thoughts A treasure trove of ubiquitous coin, Pure currency from nature’s mint. ~ Cave and outcrop, mountain valley They all participate in this language Of the senses, the shadow of owls Grazing against the night. We hear Soundless decibels played on a lute In a Moorish courtyard by a fountain Whose accompaniment is clear water. Such is the complicity between man & nature, their affection for each other. ~ We linger. Air supports the gravity of music As water does a spider. Everything floats On a sea of wonder, the first ingredient Of nature’s slumber. We begin to sleep Among anemones, daughters of the wind Hearing the vague entreaties of gods Pleading with us to heed plaintive cries Of the earth in travail. Air, again, is A composite of grief & threatened life. ~ Did Einstein have sleepless nights Knowing that his equation was already At the service of atomic angst? Did he roll over in bed, block His ears to the chatter of scientists & wish he were somewhere else? His disheveled hair suggests a man In the act of becoming a living ghost: Devil-‐dust had settled upon his soul. ~
We are beholden to men on the wrong Side of life, perpetrators of schism Dressed up in the garb of politeness: Businessmen, mining magnets, conniving Politicians in league with bluster. Their armaments are statistics Economics, and the sobriquet of jobs That sail forth into our lives with all The perspicacity of levers. ~ Nature is no match for their vacuity As they carefully wallpaper our minds With intricate patterns, disguising The cracks and fissures of their deceit. “This technology is perfectly safe,” is The mantra we hear on every street corner & from every glossy brochure, whenever A preferential share issue is offered In the name of gullibility & greed. ~ Across the world in National Parks We manage wild nature, informing It of its rights. Rangers dutifully survey Herds of bison, wolf packs, & koala Populations in their native habitat. Records are kept, feral animals killed To preserve a pristine environment. Tourists are appeased; they’re glad That nature has finally been corralled. ~ No one hears the old voice of silence Calling to itself in canyons and valleys, Breezes responding to the permutations Of stillness in glade or bush. No substance Do raindrops possess as they dimple
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Rock pools inhabited by Dreaming spirits, The Great Snake ruminating in its grotto. This is the voice of pre-‐formed life, the earth Applying a gentle poultice to its wounds. ~ We see ourselves as doctors, our stethoscopes Pressed against the palpitating lung of nature As it sucks in sulphurous gases. We hear it gasp For breath, stifled by lack of air directed Elsewhere -‐ to machines, to pneumatic life & the desert of overcrowded feed lots: Millions of steers expelling methane gas Onto supermarket shelves & into restaurants. Ozone! Your pale blue gas is about to explode! ~ Wealth is a strange business. It thrives on The accumulation of digits; there’s nothing Substantial about bank accounts, their calculus Driven by paperwork & careful cost analysis. Wealth requires the nutriment of greed As potent as any health food supplement In order to survive. Is it an addiction That makes up for our loss of innocence In the wake of nature’s retreat? Observe ~ How the earth begins to crumble in our hands, How it husbands energy with the aplomb Of a weather balloon climbing into the sky! Do we worship it as did the ancient Irish When they placed themselves in the care Of Danu? Or Shakti, & the wideness of her hips? These are earth mothers, the fullness & fertility of being. Their power is linked to the way soil propagates steady growth. ~
Gods descend into the underworld seeking Shame, the ultimate humiliation for their acts. They know why they have absconded With the lyre. Music is their opiate, drowning Out the consequence of flight. They flee Into a netherworld where earth is Kneaded from magma in an underground tomb. Precondition of a fruitful earth: the gods Embracing larval life in an unworldly womb. ~ I hear the utterance from tribesmen I sense their reverence when they approach A rock filled with power, left there By Dreaming spirits at the time of creation. I touch convolutions of primal matter As it struggles to enter their speech. They are reaching out to noun, to verb, to past & present, as a method of understanding The structure of the universe. ~ This is what we fail to heed, the way earth Air, fire, & water perform alchemy When they’re not driven into the ground By pollutants, artificial fertilizers, & The pollulation of annual reports Delivering attractive dividends to their Shareholders. Nature has no answer to The bland assumptions of desk-‐bound men Championing the role of statistics & graphs. ~ Faultlines meet, and tectonic plates Heave when confronted by the great forces Of industry. The machine is king: monster
Bulldozers scythe through the earth
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Much like a field of wheat. Chaff is formed From the detritus of stone, toxic tailings & disrupted Dreaming trails fashioned by Spirits, whose council has been ignored In the interest of company profits. ~ The disease. Not speaking this language Letting it die on our lips. Nature’s etymology Has been submerged in a fungus of ordinary speech. Can we not put our ear to the earth and hear It speak, its voice as soft as a fawn’s ear Cocked towards the imminence of danger? Signs are the clearest indication of its nearness When it pleads with us, when it asks us To pour libations upon its altar ruined. ~ Listen. I repeat: listen. The music of spheres Is no metaphor, but the earth’s vibratory sound Rendered in perfect pitch. Nature hears it And responds. Every atom is aligned to rhythms Syncopated by all the perfection of numbers. Pythagoras knew it, as salmon do leaping rapids In their bid to return to a bend in the river Where life was given and received. Don’t Ignore the consanguinity the earth offers. ~ Harsh music, this music of a broken planet Struggling to hold onto its place in the universe. Who will tend its illness? Who will take its hand & tenderly press it to their breast? Mendicant Of another age, exiled from his own land, Will he kindly offer his staff to the wayfarer? Or will it be one of us called to break the cycle Of abuse? Till the soul’s soil with prayer, This alone is at the heart of nature’s converse.
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III. O Pardes!
No one knows what a flower thinks when dawn light petals the earth Grave is that beauty, a palimpsest cleansed of every flaw, its stylus sharpened by symmetries melded in a crucible alight with deep gestures of existence No sound is heard, except when eggshells break & chicks take their first breath It is the sound of the earth turning upon its axis polar regions slowly grinding into action Arctic machinery in slow eclipse Correspondence. Language of effects when one thing cohabits with an inner method known only to a fire that enlivens quintuple gold
Hermetic elements. Solicitude in a retort, mercury & ether vying with coagulation deemed necessary for distillation as an ice-‐blue quest lapis
No answer to the water gourd silvered by sunlight on a pathway by a spring
making fluid, oh! so colourless is this carrier of life Configurations are the way nature leaps into consciousness, a startled deer chased by fear & loathing
hyenas waiting to attack One is manifold when ten emanations from the godhead slowly unfold, branches of a tree suffused with their canopy of gifts. Lamps irradiating in mirrors wicks aflame from the lubricity of sacred oil I am, je suis, io sono various remarks etched into bark as soil erupts
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Nature has no answer to the smoothness of verbs flowering among thistles posing as nouns Language is a two-‐way street when syntax becomes enmeshed in a skein of life Glow worms shine, apostrophes amid the forest releasing it from darkness An owl blinks, sage-‐like & bemused for fear of missing the point as insects invisibly enunciate themselves.
O Pardes!
Hints of deep secrets lying among the glimmer of opal suggestive of the esoteric
buried underground
‘and the earth was formless’ astonishment This is how exegesis works Emanations. Nature irradiates from a unitary core
angels seated on thrones where formlessness intersects with the world
Bark, too many words discarded in the name of growth leftover planets find habitude in untempered judgment an admixture of overflowing spills & dark powers Evil is estrangement from created it Totemic life is our only hope bringing us into contact with incomparable moments,
lying at the heart of it a bird call, water over rapids, cold fire on a winter’s night These are talismans, helping us in our struggle to fly voices in concert with an earth in repose Language halts before the briar bush dreading its thorns afraid of dismemberment Nature resists its call to arms fearful of words
Surrender to the bliss of leaf-‐fall amid autumnal moments contraction of earth, sleep a gesture of rebirth after equinox
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& the tabulations of thirst Poets carefully till the earth plant poems
watch as they blossom forth in a florilegium of words lingual roots thought a nutrient as natural as humus Walnuts mirror hemispheres home of memory & remorse their hard carapace the stuff of intellect resistance to argument boneheads in the pay of cant Vowels germinate in the earth sounds engaging with stones cantillation! O the humming noise of words as they meander underground message unleashed revelations earthquake shattering the surface Caves as vast echo chambers of bones, half-‐buried histories augment wall paintings spirits
in dialogue with long dead men
Let us distinguish that still point where idea and earth intersect holy tongues of flame, the flame of language Listen, burnished sounds! glow of knowledge phosphorescence on water at night Noise of meteors, plunging toward earth
this is light this is the bright trail of wayward cosmic expression chanting its confabulation of verses Listen to the heart’s murmur Singing in our blood the blood of earth mingled with planetary dust that dust left over from innumerable frissons
quivering on the edge of the universe Let it be known that such frissons are noiseless
utterly silent as they ricochet around the universe newborn rocks, converging with elements
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preparing for their encounter with time words
built into their very structure as they haggle with names
This is cosmic speech, the language Our bodies hear when attuned to nature’s grief vacant interstellar spaces in tears
as they brush against our penchant for destruction O earth, forgive us our trespasses Forgive us for desecrating your worth. Notes P 12. The Cocytus River was one of the rivers that surrounded Hades. P 21. The Pardes is regarded as mystically linked to the word pardes in Hebrew, meaning “orchard”. Pardes is also etymologically related to the English word "paradise," and Old Persian, pairidaêza, meaning “deer park”.
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James Cowan has published over thirty books, including
fiction, non-‐fiction, essays, poetry, biography, and art monographs. He is a recipient of the ALS Gold Medal for Literature in 1998, as well as an honorary doctorate in the USA. His work has been published in more than 25 languages
www.james-‐cowan.net Cosmos Press. Bangalow, N.S.W. Terra Nullius copywright © 2015 by James Cowan
First printing