Elegy Written As A Reflection On Our Blue Mountains Walk

At the end of our lives, let’s hope we don’t regret all the risks we didn’t take, and cherish the ones we did…

I’ve had a few hairy experiences in my life, but this one ranks up there with the worst. I was going to say I have never been so fearful in my life. But that is not so. A trip from Perth in Western Australia, to my home town Adelaide, where the plane flew into unforeseen turbulence and plummeted from the sky, was by far the worst.

Still, the Blue Mountains walk, difficult as the first part was, pales into insignificance when we were confronted by the return route.

Still we made it. We congratulated each other. We were sure we’d do it again, but that was one recovery beer talking. We never did.

But harrowing as it was at the time, we still reflect on the beauty that we were part of, for that brief time.

Of course that makes me lament on all that progress, as we tend to see it, has done to our planet. It also made me want to write an elegy about it.

I love the poetic structure of elegy. Though some elegiac poems tend to carry sadness and regret, many are more pensive and reflective, I think.

‘Early elegiac poetry was typically versed in couplets. But, dating back to the eighteenth century, an elegiac stanza has traditionally contained the following characteristics:

• It is a quatrain (four lines)
• It contains an ABAB rhyme scheme
• Each line is written in iambic pentameter

‘This structure is only a loose guideline. Many contemporary elegies contain no set form, and even the nineteenth-century elegies by the likes of Whitman and Tennyson take ample liberties with meter and rhyme scheme.’

This elegy belongs to the time when we found ourselves wrapped in the arms of Nature…deep down in a stunningly beautiful gorge. There’s something magical about being totally away from the noises of the world, and instead, absorbed in all things natural, bird calls, the swooshing of a waterfall, and the relative calm.

Which makes me wonder why we don’t do more camping, living simply, technology-free, and being at one with the earth, in all its majesty, and all its mystery.

The earthquake strikes: its force we can’t control.

Droughts arrive. Some leave a deadly toll.

A lightning strike, and then the thunder claps.

An avalanche of snow. Some die, perhaps.

Nature’s force we try to understand.

It oft is fraught, and rarely in our hand.

So much we cannot see, and though we try,

Nature is our master, by and by.

Our waterfalls, their laughter fills the air.

Their beauty such, we can but stand and stare.

Our lungs inflate, as mountain air we breathe.

The need to stay, more pressing than to leave.

Imperfect, yet so perfect, Nature is.

She charges not, for all things that she gives.

Her message, subtle, and so very low,

Is, use the pace of patience, as you go.

Walk with me. Walk and you will see.

That all you want is here. Now you can be.