Aspects of Creation : according to the Aborigines - and me.

being a response to Jingle Poetry's prompt of Moods, Feelings and Emotions.

In the beginning Earth was flat and featureless,
devoid of interest, of life or consequence.
And then there came the Dreamtime,
a great age of change, when giants rose
up from the soil to roam the land.
Half human and half animal, they wore
the natures of the beasts and birds, but acted
in a wholly human way, and set out for all time
the way the Aborigines would live their lives.
They camped, lit fires, they dug for water,
fought each other, hunted, killed to eat.

When finally the Dreamtime reached its end
a moment shrouded in great mystery,
the great, half-human heroes had to go,
their time was up, but as they went,
wherever one had left his mark, a feature
rose up from the land to say he had been there.
A watercourse, a tree, a mountain. Every
artefact the Aborigines enjoy was left to them
by those of old. And more: their laws and customs,
memories, all given. Each one absolute.
As in the Dreamtime, so it still must be, they say.

It happened, though, that in the early days
there came two skyfolk from above to hunt.
They moved in silence, setting traps and tracking prey.
In doing so, they came upon a man
and woman making love - or trying to.
A passionless performance doomed to fail.
This so disturbed them that they took to studying
the Aborigines at work and play, and came to see
that these earth folk had two emotions only: rage and fear -
the two that babies still exhibit in the cot.
Enough, no doubt, for their survival, but insufficient
to guarantee their race into the future.

And so the skyfolk donned their fearful aspects,
striking terror like a flame into the hearts
of men and women. Two beside a lake
they took, rigid in their arms, and flew,
first high above a mountain range,
then on, beyond the desert, to Woomoombo,
a volcano, very large and fiery, then in full eruption.

They flew into the crater, down amongst the spewing
cinders, very near the flames, until their captives
could not breathe. In mortal fear of their two captors,
they faced an even greater fear, that of nature
at its angriest. Unknown to them, within their souls
a tiny portion of that early fear had broken off
and from it awe had grown. Next thing, the sky folk
carried them away to a deserted island.
There they showed them passions greater
than they'd ever known - and in their new-found
awe they were both thrilled and terrified,
a state in which they saw for the first time this thing
called beauty manifest itself in beach
and tree, in sea and distant mountain.
And so it came to pass that a full range
of human feelings and emotions came to earth.
The last act of the skyfolk was to give
them music, art and poetry, a soil in which
to nurture their new feelings.

---

Haiku #310

To be in the mode
think about your third wardrobe -
a choice of night attire