Wild seas

Tags

ageing

Today I found a shady, grassy glade

amongst the banksias

between the dusty road and the roaring sea.

For once, I sat and beach-read:

poems about ageing, dementia, death,

obliquely angled

at subjects that cause terror.

I ventured in amongst wild breakers

only so far, not too far,

and yet I felt the dragging sea.

I braced myself in sand

and faced the monster firmly.

But still it chivvied me

and shoved me fast and fierce

to where I did not want to be,

tumbled helpless in a swirl of sand.

I stumbled shorewards,

safe this time

to seek the refuge offered by the shade,

poems about

ageing, dementia, death,

no longer so oblique.

Malice of crows

Tags

gossip

 

Farmland road dense with flies

edged with Queen Anne's lace

winds through green paddocks

past watery vestiges of flood.

Blackberry canes flaunt thorns and ruby fruit.

 

 

The road leads to a scandal of the past.

Malicious crows crarck crarck

“He's old she's young.”

crarck crarck “You'd think he'd have more sense”

crarck crarck.

 

A kookaburra laughs his mockery of love.

Hoohahahahadulteryhahadultery!

 

But then the liquid voice of magpie

rumples the air

and carols joy in love.

 

 

The road winds back the years

to lovers old now

gossip not forgotten.

 

 

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Silence and the crow

Tags

Broken Hill

I

I’d forgotten silence,

assaulted as I always am by ocean

relentless in its rolling.

 

I sit here now

Above desert red and olive green.

Quartz glints and sparkles.

 

Immensity invades my heart

 

and silence.

 

II

I sit in silence writing.

 

A crow accosts me,

Piercing me with white-rimmed stare,

black feathers ruffled by the intermittent wind.

 

Perched on sharp rocks

she quarks her crow cry,

lazy, inconsequential.

 

Glides off above my head

wings panting

pale vee contained by darker gleam.

 

Rides the sky as eagles do,

her crow-cry mocking now,

deriding all that’s tied to earth.

 

III

Humbled by the judgement of the crow

I shrivel.

 

Until desert colours glow again,

quartz glints

 

and silence reinflates me.

For six years in the 1990s I lived in Broken Hill, which became my second heart-place. Then I moved to the coast, and it was twelve years before I returned to the centre. This poem was written in the flora and fauna sanctuary about 10km out of town during that return visit. Since I was living in the cottage set aside for visiting writers, I thought I’d better write.

The poem went through one revision a few years ago, in discussion with a poetry-writing friend. On Tuesday, I submitted it to further scrutiny and revisions at a poetry writing group in Cobargo, where thoughtful suggestions and generous approval encouraged me to post it here.

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