Weather Report

Closed –

my favourite track to the beach.

I lift the string, step beneath it,

take the risk.

Hard to believe … a cliff

where the ramp used to be.

Hurled logs and whole trees

lie splayed like bodies.

Far out, voluminous grey waves

in rich turmoil boil to white,

attack a shore

that can't escape.

Victory. The water surges

higher than it's ever been,

to the abrupt end of the track,

excitedly bashing the debris.

I've walked this beach in calm winter

gathering unlimited shells;

in spring and summer

skipped and played like a child.

Now: deep, cold fury

roars and hisses as I retreat. 
Tonight I won't challenge 
this menacing sea.

Linked to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #295

Exploring New Landscapes

We move away from the city, north to clear skies, to low horizons ringed by mountains – not high-rise columnar blocks of rectangular windows, their blank panes angled for concealment. The trees are silvery green alongside the railway track. We pass a river harbour teeming with small white boats.

I am reminded of another journey once taken – of moving through greyness, through cold, toward one flush of colour, pink with highlights of gold. A flower in the snow, blooming early. Too early. Yet we were drawn towards it, wishing it to keep on blooming until we might reach it, stroke its petals, inhale.... Some journeys, though full of longing, can never be completed.

he travels alone

an old man gazing at trees –

the train gathers speed

Image copyright © Kanzensakura 2014 
Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Written for Haibun Monday 5 at dVerse
Also linking to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #289

A Bus Ride with Van Gogh

I pass the cane fields, some of the cane still standing, some burnt back to the bare, blackened ground. A few have tiny new plants already growing. In the background are wooden houses on stilts, ramshackle, dotted across the landscape, distant from each other behind clumpy dark trees. The sky is awash with low grey cloud. We cross a bridge. The wide flat river is likewise grey.

In Vincent's landscape, here on my iPad, the fields are rolling waves of colour – vivid blue and green, splashes of sunny gold. The sky is riotous too, only a little lighter, as if reflecting the land. A haystack nestles in front of a cluster of houses, all of them white-walled and blue-roofed. The Autumn trees are orange and gold. 

The scene I am passing through alters to high-rise city – shops, offices, tenements. The walls are beige or grey, the roofs dark red or brown. 

These contrasts deceive. I am travelling towards our Summer country. Northwards, the further we go the more the sky lightens, becoming suffused with sun.

sad or mad –

yet in pulsing colour

he paints joy

Image: View of Church of Saint Paul de Mausole, by Vincent Van Gogh


Written for dVerse Haibun Monday 3

Linking this to Poets United's Poetry Pantry #281 (December 6 2015)

View from the Bus Window

This far south of the Equator

the sun’s rays take a lengthy slant

and evenings last

for hours and hours,

turning the grasses golden

below the line of trees

that march in single file

along the top of the hill.

This was my father’s country,

all undulant curves

and soft, gentle colours.

No wonder he was so fond of women!


(An old journal entry I came across, which needed little tweaking to turn into a poem.)

 I'm linking to Gillena's Monday WRites 35:

Asked to Write on Gravity, I Find Myself Unable

It's Spring in Northern Rivers

and the jacaranda's out.

The sky is wide light blue,

the ocean's warming up.

The boys are in their singlets,

displaying their tattoos.

The girls are in their pretties

with short and floaty skirts.

The breeze is fresh and playful.

I'm eating fish and chips.

The only kind of gravity

I'm conscious of today

is that which holds me to this ground

where I am glad to be.

The Midweek Motif at Poets United this week is Gravity.

(I'm calling this a 'sonnet variant' because, while it's not one of the recognised sonnet forms, neither is it free verse exactly – and it does have some sonnet features.)

Listening

Soft rain will fall this morning.

Already, clouds are whitening all the air.

There is a hush on the trees,

the gentle ripple of their leaves too slight

for sound to happen yet.

Poised and waiting still

the earth is readying for sustenance.

Slowly, birds arouse

with flutterings and anxious little cheeps.

The leaves begin to rustle.

I too have a thirst.

Yet I too hesitate, and pause awhile.

To open to the boundless

cannot, surely, be a hasty thing,

must not be impatient?

Or can it – must it – be?

Perhaps, to slake that deep, that inner thirst,

I should be open-mouthed

and all my body taut with urgency

for the soft rain to fall.

I write this (way ahead of time!) to my own prompt for Poets United's Midweek Motif for Sept 16: "'Let your song be delicate' – or not." I give people a choice, but personally am attempting delicacy (in case you couldn't tell).

Early Spring

Lorikeets swoop in and out of my bottlebrush.

I went for my first walk of Spring today,

though Winter isn’t officially gone.

Ah, but it feels over!

A pink camellia blooms on my neighbour’s bush.

Bougainvillea starts across the way.

The nature strips up the hill and my lawn
are dotted with balls of clover.

A 55-word poem for flash 55 at 'imaginary garden with real toads'. 

We Used to Walk

We used to walk here to this table

above the creek, take notebooks out

and pens of course, companionable,

we sat just here together, wrote

by trees and water: calm delight.

I see, returning to the spot,

it’s been repainted, this old table....

We used to walk

for twenty minutes, rest in quiet

right here beside the creek, and write.

Now here again alone, I’m able

to view the place at last — oh, sweet! —

we used to walk.

Submitted for dVerse Form for All: the Rondeau

Pottsville Beach, Late Afternoon

30 Poems in 30 Days: Day 17
Write a poem that is set at or near where you live.

The shoreline is utterly altered after the storms
but summer is coming, we can get to the beach again.
Someone has partly restored the path that became a cliff
easing it into a soft hill of sand we can trudge down and up.
Others are here already, walking or fishing.

The waves come in now in opposing directions
turning on each other like the edge of half a whirlpool.
The shallows are all uneven; in places huge licks extend
reaching nearly to the foot of the cliff, in far beyond the rest.
This is a sea I don’t want to turn my back on.

But I do while I fossick for stones in the slush:
interesting shapes, beautiful colours, satisfying textures.
Here is a comma and here a heart. Some are marked with crosses
others circled by raised, contrasting rings. One is a pearl, translucent white,
others are black and smooth, shining like onyx.

Then everyone stops. We all stand still and gaze.
I’d heard two days ago there were whales about, seen
from the headland at Hastings Point, and now they are here
disporting themselves in leisurely ease, back behind the breakers,
cresting and diving, leaping and plunging.

A glimpse of graceful tail, a curving fin or a snout,
a sudden spume of white, a burst of foam. A silver glint
from the underside of a fin caught by the sun. And the sky vast,
pastel blue with long white feathery stripes of cloud stretching across.
The ocean sparkled, seeming to sing.

Winter Beach

The sea is deep green, darkening further out on an indigo horizon, frothing in whirlpools of white, where it laps the sand coming in close to the cliff. Above the cliff-top trees a small hawk sails over in one long glide of still wings, so close that I look up and see the dark beak and eye, red throat and golden belly. It’s long since I inquired what messages the natural world would speak into my mind. Today there is nothing. I watch the ocean roll and the hawk pass, magnificently indifferent.