You might stay that way, maybe forever, with no world to belong to and belong to you. You in your many high places, looking over looking over, waiting for a sign. You’re nearly ready, nearly there.
You’re trying to read a flat pattern, like the sea, the land from high above. Or you might see your shadow falling upon this page. And maybe that’s all you’ll see and understand.
Or you might drift in. Fall or dive in. Enter.
Wind drift, rain fall, river rush. The air, the sea all round. And the storming.
You alight on higher ground, gather, sing. It may be.
You listen to me. We’re gunna make a story, true story. You might find it’s here you belong. A place like this.
And it is a beautiful place, this place. Call it our country, our country all ’round here. We got river, we got sea. Got creek, rock, hill, waterfall. We got bush tucker: apple, potato, sugarbag, bush turkey, kangaroo, barramundi, dugong, turtle ... every kind. Sweet mangoes and coconuts too.
There is a store, school for our kids and that mission here still. That’s all right. Yes, you might never see a better place. Our home.
When it’s rainy season rivers fill up and food and surround us.
Is like we are a forgotten people then, on a maybe shrinking island; a special place for us alone.
You might fly in many times, high up and like reading river, hill, tree, rocks. Coming from upriver and the east, you flying flying fly in looking all the time and remembering; you flying quiet and then you see this place. You see the river. You see the water here, this great blue pool by High Diving where the kids swim. You see the mission grounds all green, and the houses all quiet and tiny from up in the air. You notice the dark mango trees, and the coconut trees standing tall along that airstrip road. That airstrip is like a cross, because there’s two airstrips. The old people built them in the war, with the army and the fathers, when those Japanese bombed this place. They make a cross for someone like a sky pilot to land on.
But, first time, you in a plane. You go over the gorge and you see the landing where the barge came in long ago. You see that and you see where the river goes into salt water, and the islands scattered blue offshore. Then the plane banks and maybe you see nothing just sky, or maybe the trees the road the rubbish then in front of you the gravel coming up and bang you are landed.