#182 Kevin Brophy 'Purnululu Park'

#182 ‘Purnululu Park’

Behind smoke the western sun

drapes itself in an Aboriginal flag.

Birds strut in under our feet

as though we are the intruders.

Mountains so old they’re barely hills

have become all shoulders, broken backs.

Here, they say, no one entered the gorges,

here death lived and still lives.

At the shop a woman talks of how

visitors go out there without water.

Signs by the track mention something about

360 million years of weather.

It takes one large stone to scare the snake

from the toilet.

We eat lunch in a frog hole

and walk along a grey sculpture

carved by water we can only imagine.

A gorge offers slivers of sunlight

like the briefest blessings to the snakes

and frogs of its long corrosion.

Pungent spinifex becomes the garden

of needles no one can cross.

It is all light, light that gets in behind

everything, a soaking torrent of it.