Mourning Day Service, Eaglehawk UCA

 

From the beginning

A slight  rework of a previous post, offered with Mourning Day services in mind (January 21)

From the beginning

From the beginning as continents drifted

God’s Spirit hovered over this land;

sculpting, renewing; rock, tree and lizard,

rainforest richness, waves crashing on sand.

Having sung country into existence,

the Spirit calls out: First Peoples, come!

This is your land now, tend and enjoy it,

step with its rhythms, dance to its thrum.

We thank you, Lord, for this ancient wisdom,

feeling the heartbeat, singing its songs;

harvesting grasses, trapping the fishes,

lighting the fires to keep country strong.

We thank you, Lord, for this ancient culture,

graciously shared with those who late came.

Help us remember, and to acknowledge

eras of dispossession and pain.

We thank you, Lord, for being there, present

with those who struggle, from country removed;

living in two worlds, seeking a future,

may they find hope and know that they’re loved.

Lord we rejoice in the wonder of songlines;

Spirit connections throughout our wide land.

Welcome love’s offer to journey together,

healing the nation to meet love’s command.

© Ken Rookes. Revised 2024

Freely available for use in worship.

Tune: Bunessan. TiS 156

Uluru Statement from the heart

 

Australian Wilderness

a perhaps pertinent poem for an Australian Lent.

    Australia

A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey

In the field uniform of modern wars,

Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws

Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,

A woman beyond her change of life, a breast

Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:

The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,

The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.

In them at last the ultimate men arrive

Whose boast is not: 'we live' but 'we survive',

A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

And her five cities, like five teeming sores,

 Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state

Where second-hand Europeans pullulate

Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home

From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find

The Arabian desert of the human mind, -

Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare

Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes

The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes

Which is called civilization over there.

- A. D, HOPE

The grass withers, the flower fades ...

Haiku of Shame

You know, or at least you should know.

Micah 6:8

When I was younger,

more naïve than innocent,

I was happily aware of the privilege

that attends the accident of birth

in this generous land.

Australia, the young and magnificent,

of blue sky, strong sun, gum trees,

parrots and crashing surf;

prospering as both farm and quarry

to the rest of the planet.

We would never go hungry.

Growing older,

I would hear stories from other countries,

and my own; of people for whom life itself

and an occasional full stomach

was the privilege. Humans like me

who weep at cruelty, face daily oppression,

and yearn despairingly for peace.

Children who might never learn to read,

adults who might never cast a vote,

women denied their rightful opportunities,

minorities treated as if they didn’t matter,

indigenous people whose dreamings

are dismissed as a primitive irrelevance,

people cut off from home and country

and waiting for a place of safety and welcome.

My sense of privilege achingly sharpened,

and with it the conviction that these wrongs

should not, must not, go un-righted.

Still later,

I came to hear the ringing words

of the ancient prophet, humbly realising

that the disturbing call to justice

is also my own.

© 2011 Ken Rookes