The first poem in my Cairn of Poems was In Praise of Marriage by Judith Wright (1915-2000). https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/05/28/in-praise-of-marriage/ I spent a year reading through her collected poems, and I must have encountered this short, simple and beautiful poem. But I didn’t remember it when I encountered it again in 100 Poems on the Underground. The idea of putting poems on the Underground (or the Tube, as I call it) was a splendid idea. The Tube is crowded, noisy, smelly, but also, as you are shifted rapidly from Stockwell to King’s Cross, a place for contemplation. Passengers are often so crushed together, more closely than when in bed with their partners, that contemplation is the only possibility; and contemplation can be helped by looking up and seeing a short poem.

And what better to read than this poem by Wright that takes us to the Australian rainforest and reminds us that “one is all and all are one”? She reminds us too that we “measure, distinguish, and are gone.” We need to move into the dream of the rainforest; perhaps then we might avoid the forest burning and the frog and humanity dying. But even if the forest, the frog, the python, and we are gone “yet one is all and all are one.” The miracle of life may happen for the second time and omething will surface before the planet is finally destroyed.

Rainforest

The forest drips and glows with green.
The tree-frog croaks his far-off song.
His voice is stillness, moss and rain
drunk from the forest ages long.

We cannot understand that call
unless we move into his dream,
where all is one and one is all
And frog and python are the same.

We with our quick dividing eyes
measure, distinguish and are gone
The forest burns, the tree frog dies,
yet one is all and all are one