Thirteen androgynous men and women, dressed in pressed black suits, like some swarm of government bees, stoically entered the dilapidated school bus with solemn disregard for the general mass of people surrounding them in the California street, and the sun was shining. An ecclesiastic figure, swathed in purple robes with wild glittering gleaming beads adorned across the body, stepped forth from the shadows of a cluster of palm trees; it wore an incredible mask, damask as a rose with intricate golden patterns around the cheek and toward the forehead of which was embellished with an etched geometric pattern that seemed to resemble a flower and faint lines that would require a keen eye to be seen and elaborated upon. The hood was up and formed a velveteen waterfall at the back of the head, as it crumpled over, though it was probably designed to look that way. As each member of the secretive yet oddly unconcealed cult traipsed onto the growling, garish yellow bus, the pensive figure gazed on and regally followed the group, taking a place at the back, holding a staff with arms crossed, and the rest sat coldly, staring ahead, unblinking and sedate. The hours passed under the drab desert sun as a singular cloud passed overhead and gradually dissipated into invisible vapours that fell gradually into the densely blue backdrop of the California sky. The old school bus chortled along the deep black road, with pristine lemon lines hugging the left-hand wheels and a driver as stoic as the passengers. There, in the desert, amongst the snakes and the saltbush, a rusted old bus, full of strangers had parked, and with little fuss the suited men and women reached below their seats and removed a piece, they exited in an orderly fashion with eyes fixed ahead and hands immovable from their guns, gripped tightly as if life itself was within those guns. Colt M1911 to be exact. Every gun, though not obvious to an outsider, was loaded with a single bullet (230 gr Federal HST) and cocked, with the manual safety on. Each of the silent group had left the bus, with their apparent leader at the back of the line, holding the staff and the driver stayed seated with the engine off and staring straight ahead into the vast expanse of the sandy hell ahead of him. Twenty metres from the stationary bus, the man and women formed a perfect circle, each were standing a little over an arms distance from the next person. The robed figure took centre stage and uncrossed its arms, the staff outstretched in the left hand. A magnificent golden rod, a thousand etched stories from base to tip, each one emblazoned with fantastical jewels, this staff could belong to a Queen, a King, a God. The followers were still silent, and still stoic, despite the glaring sunlight reflected from every wild diamond and ruby on the majestic phallus like object. The masked person made a crude attempt to engage a member of the round by walking before them in a cyclical fashion, making eye contact with each but none did move, nor bat an eye. Finally it took its place, back at the centre of the circle and made an unholy sound that sounded as if the Devil himself were dying. Garbled words and unnatural screeches thronged from the unmoving masks mouth piece before suddenly falling silent and it raised the staff higher before striking the earth with passionate fury, and this led a simultaneous movement from the centralised hive mind as they each removed the safety from the own weapons. A single shrill scream echoed across the valley and a second strike to the ground from the staff was the indicator to raise the guns to the person to the immediate right. No noise was made, but a third strike of the staff to the desolate, cracked ground caused thirteen concurrent shots to ring across the arid lands, followed by thirteen solid thuds and a ghostly silence fell across the desert once more. A perfect circle of death among the cacti and Kangaroo rat, and the silence finally broken by the starting engine of a school bus as the driver awakens from his trance and returns back to an apparently civilised world. The fine figure gently steps over a corpse and lifts its robe so as not to disturb the pooling blood before sauntering into the basin of a lonesome American desert and fading into obscurity.

ashen wasteland
healed by dew
pulses, trembles
birthed anew
Mother beating
midnight drum
     lily, crocus
     cherry, plum

yearling stumble
hatchling drop
grizzly bumble
salmon flop
coyote howl
jackal bay
gleamy-eyed
they stalk their prey
brutal jaws
on tawny throat
****** tears
in tawny coat
feign o possum
flee o hare
     saffron, saltbush
     tulip, tare


Mother sows,
human reaps,
forward still
the forest creeps
hack and slash
slash and burn
     maple, mayfly
     buckthorn, fern

chipmunk gather
raccoon store
silence on
the barren moor
groundhog slumber
grizzly snore
    knocking on
    the Old Man's door

We’d travelled more than a hundred miles
From the nearest outback town,
The sun was roasting the plains out there
And the heat was getting us down,
We’d left all the eucalypts behind
And there wasn’t a patch of green,
Only a scrubby saltbush there
Where the natives used to dream.

We halted just as the sun went down
And Miranda let out a sigh,
‘Have ever you seen such stars as these?’
And pointed up at the sky,
The heavens shone with a mighty glow
From the stars that glittered, proud,
Each was lighting the earth below
From the inky black of its shroud.

But underneath us the ground was hot
And the track it lay, bone dry,
There’d not been even a single drop
Of rain, since the last July,
We huddled up in the four wheel drive
As the air began to chill,
I pulled a blanket across our knees
And we slept for a little while.

Miranda had some Arunta blood
From her great-grandmother’s side,
She’d learned of some of their culture, and
She had the Arunta pride,
We woke to a distant whirring sound
And Miranda sat up straight,
And murmured, ‘That’s a Tjurunga
Trying to open heaven’s gate.’

‘The white men call it a Bull Roarer,’
She said, with a hint of fear,
‘And I’m forbidden to hear it, for
It’s not for a woman’s ear.
They’ll **** me if they should find me here
For breaking their sacred law,’
She slid down over her seat, and sat
Her head down, close to the floor.

I climbed on out of the cab, and stood
Surveying the dark surround,
The whirring seemed to be closer now,
And the pitch went up and down,
An icy chill ran along my spine
As I saw a movement there,
Something slithering over the ground
Not far from where we were.

I froze in shock, and I held my breath
When I saw a pair of eyes,
Both the colour of rubies, and
Of quite enormous size,
And then I saw the head of the snake
As it ploughed a furrow, deep,
Its body the colours of rainbows, then
Miranda took a peep.

She said, ‘It’s the Rainbow Serpent,’
As the whirring sound went on,
Covered her ears and shut her eyes
And said, ‘It’ll soon be gone.’
I climbed back into the cab and locked
The door, and lay down flat,
Trembled in fear, I’d never seen
A snake as big as that.

The dawn was gradually breaking as
I took a look outside,
And there, where the ground had been quite flat
Was a creek, ten metres wide,
And water, straight from the Queensland rains
Was pouring over the land,
Sluicing along the new creek bed
Where before, there was only sand.

I’d never believed in the Dreamtime
Or the tales that the natives tell,
But somewhere the Rainbow Serpent roams
With eyes from heaven or hell,
We turned the nose of the jeep around,
Drove back to the town once more,
I’ll never return to the desert, where
You can hear the Bull Roarer’s roar!

David Lewis Paget

The ground had rumbled for quite some time
It was only a minor quake,
The people grumbled, it came and went
But it kept them all awake,
‘They say there was a volcano here
A billion years ago,
But it’s long since dead, the geologists said,
And there’ll be no lava flow.’

They’d built the suburb on rising ground,
And roads, right up to the peak,
The ground was rocky and unforgiving
The soil was grey and weak,
So little grew on that rising crest
Just the odd saltbush or so,
They couldn’t drill through the rock beneath
To help their bushes grow.

I would venture out and would take the air
When the house cooled down at night,
But always felt there was something there
That would make me feel uptight,
I felt the rumble, under my feet
It was like a muffled roar,
And I thought a whimsical thought one night,
It was like an old man’s snore.

One night I wandered up to the crest
And I saw two bushes move,
They seemed to tremble and flutter there
Just above a ball shaped groove,
The rumble stopped as I stood and watched
From under the starlit skies,
The bushes opened to crystal orbs,
Just like a pair of eyes.

They fixed me there in their crystal stare
And I didn’t dare to breathe,
The summit started to shake and move,
And then it began to heave,
The houses built on the crest fell down
It was like a huge hiccup,
And I fell tumbling to the ground
As the Mountain God stood up!

David Lewis Paget