(an ode).
The Shrine.
A whitened, limestone country road,
Wedding ribbon white in the Mallee sun,
Mile upon mile stretching lonely, ever on,
Past a wrought-iron gate it does run,
Where sits silent an old Mallee school,
A singular shrine for our memory’s recall.
*
In the deep hollow of a morning frost,
Mallee trees loom like spectral ghosts,
Thickly, fog slithers through the forest,
While the muffled calls of birds disturb the air,
Dewdrops, wire-captured, make sharp crystals of ice,
The cold bites to the bone and freezes there,
*
In high Summer, The Shrine sits solid, still,
Its stone walls a bulwark against the heat,
It’s iron roof in creaks and groans it yeilds ,
Under an incessant barrage of the Sun,
A crow insistent, barks its clamouring cry,
Hot, hammer-welded on the anvil of a Mallee sky.
*
In the cool silence, inside The Shrine,
All the reminders of a time long-gone,
Pictures, desks, initials carved in grain,
A welcome fireplace small at the room’s end,
And a table, clothed, in the middle sits,
Almost sacred..like an altar..lay’d with holy writ.
*
Once upon a time..
. . . A school-ma’am would ring a big, brass bell,
Starting time for lessons it labouringly peals,
Ka-ring! Ka-ring! Ka-ring! Its deep echoes chime,
Like the rolling, rhythmic chanting of a nursery rhyme,
And all the children would rush to stand in line,
To enter the classroom as instructed..one at a time.
*
Pencils, pens, nibs, ink wells and exercise books,
The school mistress chanted dictation with gravitas words,
A dozen children shuffled bare feet on a wooden floor,
Impatient for lunch-time, releasing them to play some more,
Spilling out of the small schoolhouse with all the cries and glee,
Of a rampaging, yelping, victorious, conquering army!
*
Ball, bat, and galah cry, mix as syrup in deep Mallee sky,
Onward, Tommy, onward Helen, onward little Charlotte!
A new world is awaiting your laughing chatter and talk,
Awaiting all your wild dreams and schemes and design,
One day, far away from the shelter and origins,
Of learned lessons and structured discipline. . .
*
It is recorded that..
The school was built from the saddest cost,
A schoolboy drowned as he the Murray River crossed,
The community joined to ameliorate the pain, stop another loss,
Childrens tender years lived and growing under the shade,
Under the shelter of a benevolence shown to thee,
Of This Shrine, sheltered among the Mallee trees.
*
But there is a little Principality here..in this locate’,
A small kingdom one enters through the front gate,
One touches the ethereal film keeping us at bay,
From those times gone past, and the here and now,
And for just that moment when we touch these built stones,
Desks, books, look to the pictures..with their story we co-join.
*
For what remains after a passage of years gone,
If not the visible shadows of those who lived when,
Such photos were taken, structures built, tables hand-worn,
And cannot one hear the same cries of children’s glee,
And what is it that a child there could ever see,
That could not in like kind be visible to the child in me?
*
Along that white, lonely Mallee road,
A limestone school sits in its silent realm,
Reminder of how those communities lived,
Dependent on their skills and hard work done,
The memory, fixed always now in our body and mind,
Embraced, revered ever lovingly as….The Shrine.
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