Seasons of the Scenic Rim – a poem by Glenys Drew

View south showing Springbook Plateau, Numinbah Valley, Mount Warning and Lamington Plateau from Rosin’s Lookout, Beechmont. Taken April 1994.

Photograph uploaded en.wikipedia.org by  Shiftchange 

Nature: the universe and all its phenomena. More than just flora or fauna. It’s a fantastic factory that makes the building blocks of all our lives—food, drinking water, all we own and have around us even the very air we breathe. Nature makes amazing memories, and in its wild and primitive state it inspires and forces our reverence even in its simplest form.

The Scenic Rim is a group of forested mountain ranges of the Great Dividing Range straddling the border between south-eastern Queensland and north-eastern New South Wales, Australia.
The mountainous landscape forms a quarter circle ridge positioned roughly from south of Toowoomba around to Springbrook. Tamborine Mountain, Lever’s Plateau and the Lamington Plateau are part of the rim formation. The scenic rim is considered part of the Gold Coast hinterland. Parts of the rim are well developed, crossed by highways with facilities for tourists like Cunninghams Gap, others are privately owned agricultural properties and rural villages such as Beechmont and Tamborine Mountain. Much of the rest is protected in national parks and nature reserves.

Autumn
Leaves crackle underfoot as deciduous trees divest their shady capes;
This perfect clime! As warmed treacle spilling over patchwork shapes
Of a bronzing carpet below, the sun penetrates leaf and soil;
Nature has turned her special russet key to usher, imperceptibly, Fall!

Winter
Fog fragments, as if distilled through white muslin partly torn,
Open, as a fine, filigree curtain, on another splendid morn;
Dispersing patch by patch, unseen hands seem to snatch
Clouds of wool to reveal a dewy, diamond-day: ‘Winter – with a light touch’.

Spring
Subtle sense of a different ‘feel’; a piquancy of spirit and air: Spring!
Wrens pair in private, finches form families, and butcher birds sing.
Could days and nights be more sanguine yet zestful than these?
Flowers abound, and guipure-lace crowned heads of May swarm with bees.

Summer
Hot summer days, dry rather than humid, bless the afternoon breeze
That breaches the Rim unfailingly from the sea, east;
Holiday-makers head to the ‘Lost World’ hills and valley pastures to find
The cool waterholes – a tranquil scene; friends re-meet, relax…unwind.

Glenys Drew 2011

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