{Heartbeats Echo}
In the gully the trees remember, their bark a script of survival,
ridges and seams carrying the imprints of seasons, of hands that touched,
of people who walked these paths before us,
their breath woven into sap and shadow,
their presence never gone, only changed.
Ironbark ribs lean into my ribs, and in that meeting I hear silence and murmur together,
not absence but continuation, the pulse of ancestors threading through tree rings
older than the stories we have written down, older than the words we dare to speak.
Before my voice, before any settler's pen or brush,
this land carried the songs of Wurundjeri people,
women and men, children and elders, chants moving with wind,
footsteps reverberating across granite and creek bed,
heartbeats still drumming beneath the surface of things.
Later came painters with easels and ochre light,
catching golden paddocks and gum-grey horizons.
Yet their canvases told only part of the story,
for the deeper song of Country lay beneath their brush,
waiting still in bark, in creek, in stone.
Memory does not vanish.
It waits in hollows of fallen logs, in moss that gathers where fire has passed,
in the rustle that breaks a still afternoon when the forest breathes out its long remembering.
Echoes are not faint things.
They roll like thunder in the bark, resound in clapsticks and ceremony,
in currawong calls falling through dusk,
in smoke that rises to mark both loss and belonging.
Walking the Nillumbik paths, I feel the ground murmur underfoot,
the body of land remembering the weight of many lives,
each season turning, each story layered, each silence folded into the next.
Down by Birrarung, river of mists and shadows,
Yarro Yarro ever flowing, the waters carry memory
of platypus and bark canoes, of fish traps and secrets,
ceremonies kept along its banks.
Sentient gums bear witness, roots drinking deep,
branches breathing life, all-seeing, all-knowing.
Even now smoke drifts over bends in the river, a signal of gatherings that continue,
hands passing food, stories, laughter, the air alive with belonging.
In the clearing children chase shadows across creek and stone,
while beneath fallen logs the slow work of rot feeds new green growth.
Regeneration rises from decay,
and I feel the steady gaze of ancestors in bark and water, their breath carried on evening air.
Patterns repeat: rings in the tree, ripples in the river,
the grain of stone reflecting the grain of skin.
Scars on bark mirror scars on flesh,
textures carrying survival, each mark a testament to endurance.
A cave where voices once rose in chanting holds resonance even now,
stone walls remembering what the air repeats, that the land is never silent,
that heartbeats echo through generations.
I am only one among many,
yet my ribs mirror gumtree ribs, my scars carry bark scars,
my breath joins the chorus that is never single,
the voices of people and land and time woven together.
Listen.
It is not just my cry.
It is the ancestors of this Country, their breath, their bark, their being,
their heartbeats answering through forest, river, and sky.
The land answers back with echoes of survival,
with echoes of belonging,
with love so ancient and enduring
that the canopy itself shivers and sings.
✴︎ Ajanta | Cave Dweller | Torch Bearer | Truth Teller | 2025
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