Hi, Kelpie. I’ve been wanting to read your book since it came out, and got it given to me as a Christmas present, and then devoured it. It’s a nice book! It was far from intuitively obvious to me how you were going to take the premise and make it not seem too contrived; I think the plot flows elegantly, and thus you really have the opportunity to talk about issues and your readers can hear you and ponder along. Thank you.
I was particularly intrigued about your including the rainbow serpent story, about which I’ve wondered about what sort of connection there could be to the Chinese and Mexican feathered serpent tails. Who knows, but below is a poem that came to me not to long ago. And I’ve attached a little write-up that I keep playing with, about how we could re-sacralize our neighborhoods, our regions, largely using inspiration from Australian Aborigine explanations.
I’m feeling tired, not like writing much, just now, so I thought I’d send this brief note, and hopefully a bit more later.
Dharmakaya
Every grimy little scrubby mundane
stretch of country, gravel desert,
Shows the corrugated purple long view, but then
The precious diamantine jewels of the sand too,
just there,
laced with silver-grey filigreed leaves.
This must suffice, for the middle is not there…
…Unless we see it, see into it, see in it, the rainbow serpent:
Her body and her dreams,
the rocks, undulating (oh so slowly) and
Reeling out, budding,
bubble streams and droplets of colored stories.
Myths to make the blood rich and
the monkey mind hum contentedly,
Right and left, right and left,
casting couplets for footfalls,
Dancing up the ground, singing up the country.
My goodness, but she’s big.
Her massive ribbons of scaled flesh rise and swivel and swish.
I see it, I see how she moves,
the sunlight glinting off her rocky skin.
I stand, on this entire hill,
merely a protruberance of her vertebrae.
The Earth not as stage,
but we as minute insects upon her, running this way and that.
In the deluded grandeur
of our wildest fantasies,
We tickle her, as we reel ’round the trunks of trees,
Playfully running our lovers to ground,
nipping and tucking amidst her feathers,
the long plumes of her sequoias,
the soft down of her willows.
And what must she,
the great serpent,
Think of our rumbling throbbing roads, our straight steel lines, our eruptions on her skin,
The hard crystalline scale of our concrete and glass cities?
Our political divisions slapped on her like impromptu faddish tattoos?
It is reassuring to know her song
was only forgotten just the other day.
Maybe my friends and I can remember bits of it.
Sing the song of songs,
the lover’s litany of praise for her translucent skin
her shapely curves, her downy softness, her old stories,
Her raging red eyes.
