Poetry and the pathos of our first peoples

RALPH GENENDE’s first visit to an Aboriginal settlement was an epiphany that pushed him to find out more about Indigenous Australians and inspired him to write a prizewinning poem to reflect his experience.

Several years ago, I visited Darwin for the first time and also took a light plane to an Aboriginal settlement to spend Shabbat with a doctor friend doing a locum there.

Even though I had lived in Australia for almost two decades, I had never been to an Aboriginal town. The poverty and pervading sense of hopelessness and helplessness drilled deep into me. My mood shifted, however, when a local elder took us on a trip into the surrounding bush to a hidden waterfall and river.

It was a beautiful and refreshing escape from the oppressiveness of the town. The elder’s quiet wisdom and belief in his people and connection to the land was even more remarkable and inspired me to pen the following poem, which I titled Outback birth:

Moving into the interior the tall grasses
wave me to a river
and there suddenly silently I awaken to a waterfall
small and gentle it hovers in the drifting sunlight

There are moments when peace petals into our troubled lives
leaving little blossoms
in our slumbering selves

tiny messengers from the outback
memories of a distant star reminders of a faraway birth

I am sharing this poem to highlight both the power of poetry and the pathos of our first peoples.
I know that for many, if not most people, poetry is inaccessible and even mystifying. Possibly just as challenging and enigmatic as the struggles and conditions of our First Nations.

I do, however, believe that the human spirit needs more than just rational and factual information and ideas. It yearns for the spiritual and emotional as well. The ordinary or quotidian is fine for the head but fails to speak to the heart and the soul. Most prose addresses our rational side but poetry awakens our feelings and often expresses the inexpressible.

Great literature recognises the need for both. So the earliest storytellers often spoken in poetry – think of Homer’s Odyssey, the fabled stories of the Arabian nights or the 13th century Persian poet Rumi, who has been described as the "most popular  poet" whose works still resonate across the centuries and are still widely read and popular from  Azerbaijan to the USA.

Judaism has always appreciated that life longs for the lyrical as well as the prosaic. The earliest of Jewish writings - the written Torah, the five books of Moses - is legal in large part, but also contains lively poetic pieces and passages. What Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, first Chief Rabbi of Palestine called the “poetry of the law”. called the “poetry of the law”.