September 2019
Note: I got my first bike when I was 8 and I’ve been in love with them ever since. That feeling of freedom the bike gave to my younger self has remained. I cycled to work and I cycle for recreation. I love being on my bike somewhere long way from home. I’ve done that lots. These two poems have in common the beautiful bicycle.
Derelict trestle bridge, High Country Rail Trail, Victoria, Australia.
High Country Rail Trail.
From Shelly, now only a green clearing
surrounded by mountain forest,
the meandering descent is gentle.
We pass through a cathedral of trees,
straight, smooth barked and white.
We stop to gaze at yellow-tailed black cockatoos.
Startled deer bound quickly away.
Trestle bridges straddle gullies,
their rustic geometry of heavy timber
now too time worn to safely traverse.
Occasionally a short, shadowed cutting
bludgeons an old path through a low rise.
Lower down, near the undulating valley,
long straight sun-filled causeways
maintain the gradual gradient.
There, in the grasslands,
groups of horses look up and stare
and two young bulls, oblivious to all else,
bellow and shove in dusty, noisy clash.
We meet no-one in all this peaceful day.
Our only companions are shadows:
a surveyor on his horse,
engineers designing their tressels,
groups of labourers sweating and straining
or sitting quietly at smoko while their billy boiled,
farming women travelling home from town.
Gone are the creak then crash of falling trees,
the bush mills cutting timber,
the sound of hammer on steel,
the train smoking over causeway and tressel
and shuddering a slow and winding way
up the steep mountainside.
The stations which once dotted the line
are now only a gash in the scrub.
Time, in a rush of car and truck,
has swept all that work away.
All that remains is the leaf littered track,
the sagging tressels, raised causeway mounds
and a small group of cyclists coasting
easily down the gentle incline alongside
the whispering ghosts of the past.
North of Somewhere.
The kilometres slip by as easily as a caress.
You’re north of somewhere,
a long, long way from home,
just you and your bicycle
and a tangled profusion of vine and tree
is cascading down the mountain
right to the edge of the sea.
Yesterday’s mountains were distant,
green and mottled with sunlight.
Today they are crater lakes;
pelicans gliding in regal stateliness;
a strangler fig like something
out of a fantasy story,
aerial roots descending
in an impenetrable mass of columns
like a monster pipe organ for forest nymphs;
buttress roots twist and turn
in sinuous serpentine curves;
columns of light slant
through the tangled canopy
to the leafy forest floor;
little heritage villages
nestle in wide streets, sprawling corner pubs,
wooden cottages and cool, welcome drinks.
The tyres purr as they touch the road.
The chain whizzes quietly.
Blood pumps through the body.
The mind feels part of something grand.
The spirit fills with the feeling
that every little rise, every corner,
every new day is another adventure,
a magical journey
into the delicious unknown.
First published in The Poeming Pigeon.
High Country Rail Trail.
From Shelly, now only a green clearing
surrounded by mountain forest,
the meandering descent is gentle.
We pass through a cathedral of trees,
straight, smooth barked and white.
We stop to gaze at yellow-tailed black cockatoos.
Startled deer bound quickly away.
Trestle bridges straddle gullies,
their rustic geometry of heavy timber
now too time worn to safely traverse.
Occasionally a short, shadowed cutting
bludgeons an old path through a low rise.
Lower down, near the undulating valley,
long straight sun-filled causeways
maintain the gradual gradient.
There, in the grasslands,
groups of horses look up and stare
and two young bulls, oblivious to all else,
bellow and shove in dusty, noisy clash.
We meet no-one in all this peaceful day.
Our only companions are shadows:
a surveyor on his horse,
engineers designing their tressels,
groups of labourers sweating and straining
or sitting quietly at smoko while their billy boiled,
farming women travelling home from town.
Gone are the creak then crash of falling trees,
the bush mills cutting timber,
the sound of hammer on steel,
the train smoking over causeway and tressel
and shuddering a slow and winding way
up the steep mountainside.
The stations which once dotted the line
are now only a gash in the scrub.
Time, in a rush of car and truck,
has swept all that work away.
All that remains is the leaf littered track,
the sagging tressels, raised causeway mounds
and a small group of cyclists coasting
easily down the gentle incline alongside
the whispering ghosts of the past.
North of Somewhere.
The kilometres slip by as easily as a caress.
You’re north of somewhere,
a long, long way from home,
just you and your bicycle
and a tangled profusion of vine and tree
is cascading down the mountain
right to the edge of the sea.
Yesterday’s mountains were distant,
green and mottled with sunlight.
Today they are crater lakes;
pelicans gliding in regal stateliness;
a strangler fig like something
out of a fantasy story,
aerial roots descending
in an impenetrable mass of columns
like a monster pipe organ for forest nymphs;
buttress roots twist and turn
in sinuous serpentine curves;
columns of light slant
through the tangled canopy
to the leafy forest floor;
little heritage villages
nestle in wide streets, sprawling corner pubs,
wooden cottages and cool, welcome drinks.
The tyres purr as they touch the road.
The chain whizzes quietly.
Blood pumps through the body.
The mind feels part of something grand.
The spirit fills with the feeling
that every little rise, every corner,
every new day is another adventure,
a magical journey
into the delicious unknown.
First published in The Poeming Pigeon.
My Surly Long Haul Trucker at the junction of Hawkesbury and Colo Rivers, NSW, Australia.
© 2019 Neil Creighton
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