Daintree Calling

I have come back from the Daintree with a tantalising sense that, only as I was leaving, did I start to understand a glimmer of what the rainforest has to say to me. I got a hint of what I might learn, but no chance to learn it before I had to come home. I feel a very strong pull to to go back and let the language of the leaves seep more thoroughly into my imagination.

I very much want to express my incipient awareness of the rainforest story (and I've already started playing with colour and form) but I fear that I can't offer much more than a superficial description from afar. Truly, I don't think that I dreamed of the Daintree for 20 years only to dishonour it by making a pretty postcard or a nice souvenir of my short visit.

I still haven't got my travel journal back from the hotel where I left it by the bed (five phone calls later they assure me -again- that it is in the post) so I can't work with the words and images I produced while I was in the rainforest. But before I went over there I was writing this kind of thing in anticipation, and now in retrospect, it is only more true:

Twenty years ago
a flickering glimpse of Bliss
imprinted on my eyelids
the one place I felt I had to go,
in indelible, shadowy, sap green.

At night I dream
of the wise child in a forest
of towering old souls
standing and falling
dying and growing.

Daintree, you reverberate in my imagination
like a choir singing ancient cradle songs in fresh voices.
No other forest can match my desires,
my mouth waters imagining the smell of hot misty life,
I am ready to be tangled in your veins.
I hear you calling me home to Eden
and finally, I'm coming.