God is a literary snob. I’ll have the scar to prove it

5 hours ago 6

Job 20:27: And the Heavens will expose his iniquity, and the Earth will rise up against him.

In the Kimberley, the red battlements overhanging Australia’s prettiest waterfall are decorated with Gwion art tens of thousands of years old, most of it depicting people amid lively ceremony. The falling water fans out into a long semicircular fringe of white with outlying strands decorating the cliff face for hundreds of metres. Below the falls is a stretch of dark river where massive crocodiles make patient ambush. Above, there are only freshwater crocs and there, we swam away the inherent aches of this hard country.

The far side of this remote river is Indigenous land, empty now. The side we were walking was a cattle station, a couple of million acres, but the cattle were gone or gone wild. We camped on a rock shelf a kilometre above the falls and as the sun went down, I wrote a poem in my notebook.

Roads and years give out short of here
Where clear water runs chasms of red stone.
No man-made proof of man, no inkling of sapiens
Save arrangements of blood and sap on sheltered rock,
Revellers and warriors daubed by bygones,
Dressed to the nines and dancing evermore,
Beseeching their gods, soundlessly, endlessly,
Uselessly, as it turns out.

Dark fish hover atop their shadows,
Crocodiles poise in runnels like statuary
Of bronze batters awaiting the pitch.
The sun lifts leaden from the chasm’s eastern lip
Noon landing on its west and exiting
Like the show’s star, raising shade in its wake.

Bird noise falls from the nectar-fields of the plateau
Through the blue cleft of sky
To this gorge bottomed with beaches
Filigreed by paw track.
Rocks heated by the patter of rays
Leach warmth to the night
Recharging reptiles to skitter and slip their rounds.

Elsewhere, while these fish hover for morsel,
Senators veined with zealotry shriek soundbites.
Elsewhere, while these dingoes sniff for heartbeat,
Women poise over Send buttons at laptops in cafes.
Elsewhere, while these stoney lizards surveil flies,
Elevators raise and lower mirrored folk.
Here elsewhere is so elsewhere as to be nowhere,
Here is what was and will be –
The unenamored Earth staunchly oblivious
To her main monkey’s many antics.

Though reading your poetry to friends is as wantonly self-indulgent as taking a guitar to a sleepover to strum a half-arsed Desperado, I liked the poem the way writers generally like the thing just written, still steaming and fragrant from the oven of the brain. Sitting around the campfire in the dark, I read it to my three travelling companions. And was leaning back listening to the last stanza ring in the quartet of our minds when the Earth rose up against me.

God is famously prone to judgment – and a literary snob, apparently. He delivered a hatchet job. The night exploded. Red hot coals flew like tracers through the air, and I was struck a blow on the leg and flung onto my back on the rock. I grabbed at my calf and found it wet knee-to-ankle with blood.

The rock shelf our fire had been up against had erupted, sending a shard of granite the size of an axe head scything into the darkness. Water had been trapped in the rock, and water expands to 1600 times its volume in an instant as it becomes steam. I guess I’m the only person in this troubled world to have manufactured a bomb unintentionally this year.

Luckily, the couple accompanying us had once been nurse and soldier and spent decades triaging industrial carnage and machete wounds in the Third World. As callous as fully qualified doctors, they went to work staunching the blood flow and closing me up. At one stage, I heard him pouring blood from my boot into the river, and this libation of B-Positive drew the many red eyes of crocodiles nearer in the torchlight.

I’m a catatonic weasel when in pain. But they had a lolly bag seemingly curated by Hunter S. Thompson and fed me enough opioids to chill a hillbilly. After a long night in a small tent, I was medivacced out by chopper at dawn to the Mitchell Plateau and from there hopped a light plane to Kununurra ED, where they stitched and glued me as I babbled and sooked. The confounding thing is, when I show people the Stone-Age blade that speared me, none of them can help but tell me how lucky I was.