THE OURIMBAH MEDITATIONS
1
The dark is a stealthy weapon,
a vault to hold the errant child
who will not be reformed.
The gloaming, a scaffold
for her unruly spirit—
feral being, dashing
between thorns and honeysuckle.
She morphs to a powerful owl,
eyes glowering, spinning her head
in the salt bush. They fear her—
speckled, tawny, nodes
sprouting on her back.
She will become un-governable soon.
The dark will be her birdcage.
They will snip her flight feathers
before she becomes
a menace.
II
The dark churns like an ocean.
She flints the tar in her metal armour.
Amber studs glow like sabers
on the ribbon of ash.
She sees reams of time,
the past glitching in the rear-view mirror,
objects of obsession folded,
blacked out, forgotten.
The splash of headlight illuminates
but three seconds of the future.
The dark speaks in whispers
fading to lullabies,
air thinning, opening
to another world.
III
Alone, on this winding road,
she is not afraid anymore
of the bunya pines
shrouded in tourmaline ink.
She weaves from arterial roads
to the broken vein of the motorway.
The bitumen wears its night skin
like a taxidermist’s prize.
Coastal swampoaks sway
in the margins. Mile markers brood,
gargoyles over sandstone,
plateaus pleating shawls
of fern and sunburnt lichen.
The artificial eye of the high beam
grows ominous by the minute.
She remembers the birdcage—
the tremor of her heart
pressed against iron bars.
IV
The dark rustles with hidden denizens—
the hitchhiker betrayed
by the garbled compass.
Circling the dense bushland
the ghost of a killer prowls
on unpatrolled borders.
The bush drums up dust,
shivering silhouettes
of imagined beings.
Who haunts the night?
Spirits rising from the pages
of campfire stories follow her
in dizzy constellations—
orbs of weaving light,
the mind playing its cruel games,
strange pursuit on this lone highway,
past and present spinning
in dream mandalas.
V
How many ghosts ride
on her leather tonight?
Nothing touches her—
no grey fingers on her neck,
nothing to fear of those
done with the rigours of living.
In the heart of the cemetery,
all she felt was the quiet of the earth—
wet moss over slumber.
She has feared the living though—
no ghost ever mauled her body.
The road is an exercise
in silence. She remembers
those who pockmarked her spirit,
mirrors blooming in fluorescent light
with the memory of betrayals.
VI
A moon harangued by thunder clouds.
She recalls its light,
scattered over sacred figs,
over lattices of pepper vines,
how they said the moon would wake
the sleeping beast,
raise it from the netherworlds,
jaws glinting in the beams.
She would cower and wait
for it to fall upon her flesh. Yet,
no such monster ever came
except in the undergrowth
of her mind. All that lingers here,
is blue fog and rolling hills, laced
with silver banksia. She imagines
a woman in white from the lore
of the ancient bridge,
but it is just a flock of cockatoos
stirring in the night.
VII
Merge and blend—the patchwork
of sclerophyll forests
and eucalyptus bark, singing
of a time long gone.
The dark has now become her friend—
she tethers her body and rises up
outside her mortal outline.
She follows her metal carapace
as it races on the asphalt.
Death of the golden hour—night
grey and black, storm clouds
suffocating the stars. She crosses
from twilight to lands beyond
the seam of the wild bush,
body fading to an estuary of green,
Country entering her lungs,
breathing in sync.
VIII
At Hawksbury, the dark stirs again,
spider-silk undulating with the sheen
of an Andalusian horse.
She wonders what it is like
to be reborn as a midnight foal
among the sandstone cliffs.
Wild mares dot the valley face,
spirit storytellers rise
on the edges of hoary creeks,
walking the narrow gullies at night.
Plumes of mist surround
the land of the living.
IX
The colony of urban ants—
bumper to bumper
on the long satin of grey.
The rumble of rubber burns the flowers
that creep onto the boundaries,
what was once claimed, held
in tight fists. The concrete muffles
the cries of erased beings.
City lights on the horizon’s brow
blink and beckon.
Somewhere, in the urban mesh,
home is within reach.
X
It is close to the nest that the guard
slips—the danger of relief.
Home-stretch. Hazard looms,
exits fall like dominoes on the hum
of familiar roads. Sleep stings
her waterline with rock salt.
Knuckles of lamps race past
in a disorienting daze.
Twenty minutes away, three souls wait,
watching her in arrow form, pulsing
on a bright blue app. She moves
one pixel at a time, each dotted beat
a flight through air and water.
The heavens open again
onto the windshield. She has come
this far, over ash and tar.
Love will lead her home.
Artist Statement
The Ourimbah Meditations is a hybrid sequence of art, poetry, and personal reflection, and emerged from my first solo drive along the M1 Pacific motorway in Sydney last month, navigating a one-hour stretch of Ourimbah Country where dense eucalyptus forest lined both sides of the road in almost pitch blackness. As someone living with amaxophobia (fear of driving) and nyctophobia (fear of the dark), this journey became an exercise in confronting both terrors simultaneously at high speed.
The work is a sequence of ten poems handwritten in the margins of ten paintings. Each painting depicts treetops in gouache, distress inks, acrylics, and brush pen on canvas grain paper. The paintings are deliberately similar, simulating the disorienting, hypnotic repetition of passing through endless forest, where the mind begins to conjure ghosts from monotony and fear.
The process became a form of exposure therapy. Creating each painting, repeating the same treetop motif with slight variations, mirrored the repetitive exposure of the drive. The marginalia format mirrors the psychological experience: text written on the edges like intimate reflections, while painted forest dominates the visual field as it dominated my windshield. The work traces a metamorphosis from captivity through dissociation and mythmaking to arrival home, tracked by loved ones via an app.
The Ourimbah Meditations: PDF Version
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a widely-published Indian-Australian artist and poet. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, and the Sundress Best of the Net awards. She is the author of Patchwork Fugue (Atomic Bohemian Press, UK 2024), and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys (winner of The Little Black Book Competition, Hedgehog Poetry Press UK, 2024). Her new collection, Shadow Gold, is forthcoming from 5Islands Press in 2026. Her art has been featured on covers and within the pages of numerous literary magazines including Yale Divinity School, Amsterdam Quarterly, West Trestle Review, Pithead Chapel, and Superstition Review. She is the 2026 Writer in Residence at Woollahra Libraries. She lives and works in Sydney on the traditional lands of the Eora Nation. Find her on X @oormilaprahlad and on Instagram oormila_paintings
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