Singing the Snake — Billy Marshall Stoneking

Singing the Snake

(A poem of Ayers Rock)
Old Tjupurrula squeezes my arm
and puckers his lips, pointing -
Pintupi-style - toward the television set;
eyes fastened on the screen,
on dissolves of that sandstone monolith:
a montage of Uluru awash with rain;
water cascading, crashing down -
blackening the Rock…

Leaning close, he whispers:
“The rainbow -
the rainbow comes from the earth
and returns to the earth.”

It is a snake, he says,
a giant snake
with a long beard and sharp teeth.
It lives in caves under the rockhole
at the top of Uluru.

“It has no need of men or women.
No Dreamings, no ceremonies,”
he says.
It was here before Creation Times,
and has never changed its form.
“Proper cheeky one, Snake,
very dangerous;
when it is angry, the land is dry.
People drink sand.”

No one is happy for it;
no one is sad for it.
It has no need of custodians
(“Kurtangulu, nothing.”)
It is like that other one -
the serpent in the Garden.
 
 

It turns knowledge into fear,
and fear into knowledge.
But, with the right fear
you can protect yourself.
Be mindful of the Snake.
Take time to look, look again -
feel the land through your feet;
the Snake will not harm those
who show the proper respect.
Those who rush in must be strangers.

“It will attack strangers.”

The bodies of the Ancestors -
the ones killed by the Snake -
cover the earth.
“Everywhere, everywhere!”

But who can find them?
Who can name them?
If you would know this country,
you must know its stories…

 “In early days, yiriti,”
Tjupurrula says,
“bush people carried the Song.
They carried it in drought times
through dry country,
travelling at night.
 Once, when I was wiyai,
a little boy, we came -
Mummy, Father, two sisters -
from our own country to the Rock,
to Uluru, following the track
of the Old Ones…
 … silently, looking, looking,
coming to the Mother Place,
to the borning country of every ocean.

 “People traveled here
when the land filled up
with children who had no memory of rain.
From Putardi, Triinya and Karli Karru;
from Muruntji, Atila and Wimparraku,
they came…

 All the families:
some from the north,
some from the south,
some east, some west. . .
Tribes didn’t matter.
 They said ‘hello’;
they talked quietly;
they shared meat, kuka.
 Together,
they looked at the rainless sky.

 “Tjila, dry; Ilpili, dry;
Pangkupirri, dry. Everywhere, dry!
Payback was forget about;
no argument, no eye.
 Just men and women coming from forever.
Women must help, too!
Women and men, coming to Uluru. . .

 “With one, special Song, they knew,
they had the power to sing the Snake.
They could make him remember them;
they could change his mind.”

The spell of the Tongue:
a hundred hundred round the Rock,
crying out for water,
deep-lunged,
cracking the voice,
mimicking thunder, chanting:
         “Kapi!  Kapi! Kapi!”

Hands gesturing the air
night and day, circling,
until the voices became one voice
rising, falling. . .
a Song-chant for water,
becoming sure of itself.

 “Wind might be hot.
Sky might be blue.    Country all about -
dust. . .
 Never mind.
 
 

 We didn’t look for cloud;
we didn’t listen for thunder –

we had the power to sing the Snake;
to wake it, to move it,
curled in the earth;
to make it sorry. . .”

And when the Snake stirred
(“if the singing was strong and true”),
it would push the water out
from its rockhole on top -
from that danger place, the place where
every river in the world begins
and ends.

 “And like blood,
it would flow down, fall down,
alatji, everywhere, every side. . .
just like on TV:
 Kapi1  Kapi!  Kapi!
for all the thirsty people
for all us perishin’ mob.”

Rain?

“No. Not rain,” he says. “Water
from inside, where the Snake lives.
Inside the stone.”

You saw all this, I asked;
water bubbling up out of dry rock?”

“Course,” he says;
“in early days, olden times;
you know,
before the whitefellas came,
when bush people had the power
to sing the Snake.
 Water everywhere -
all the way, everyway
no worries,
from the Rock, and
 
 

fall down, fall down
fall down…
 
 without clouds. . .  without rain!”