When you are born you should be presented with a 70-year-diary, every day already filled in, a bright red ribbon tied around the cover. Then, as you work your way through life, you could constantly check where you were up to and what lay ahead. Or perhaps it would be best to leave it closed, the ribbon left done up.
Category: poetry
Evolution
A crowd, a host, of white and yellow and orange daffodils.
Guess who’s coming to lunch?
I wonder if Helen of Troy started a social club for ladies who launch?
In a strange land
We all have strangeness
in our own lives
our own families
our own family history.
Do we not?
Walk a life in my shoes
These are not the feet
that once, brown and bare,
ran on soft beach sand,
and climbed old trees.
These are not the feet
that, laced into football boots
or tennis shoes, ran and ran
on muddy fields and wooden courts.
These are not the feet
that, encased in rubber boots
or leather ones, covered miles
on field trips, or in sheep paddocks.
These are not the feet
that, enclosed in shiny black shoes,
walked the halls of power,
the lecture rooms of academia.
No, these are the feet
of an old man.
Eye of the storm
My childhood home
had a “lounge room”,
a room in the centre of the house
almost never used, but with the best furniture,
rarely sat upon, the piano,
not played, fallen silent,
since my grandfather died,
too young, too young,
and the record player.
It was, in theory, the place
where important visitors could
be taken. But most of our
visitors were unimportant, friends,
who were happy sitting in the kitchen.
The Minister of our church
might have qualified in importance,
I suppose,
but he rarely if ever came.
So it was a quiet room,
a dark room with no window,
a neat room with no mess,
no detritus of living.
It was in the very centre
of the house, surrounded
by rooms full of activity and noise –
kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, laundry,
television room, dining room.
Every house needs a quiet, still, centre,
a place for reflection.
So does every human being.
Out of the blue
Chickens
keep their eyes
on the ground
as they work the soil
scratch scratch scratch
peck peck peck.
Eagles
keep their eyes
on the ground
watching the chickens
as they work the soil
oblivious to death from the sky.
As are we.
Deceptive
I look at my hands,
their backs an old man’s hands.
I look at my feet,
their toes an old man’s toes.
I look at my face,
its wrinkles show an old man’s face.
But,
I look in my mind,
its curiosity is a young man’s still.
The day after yesterday
If your popular musical tastes were formed in the 1950s and 1960s little written after that time will seem very good.
Time’s Up
Life is like an exam in which you struggle to write as much as possible, pack as much into each answer as possible, until the moment when the teacher says “Time’s Up”, and you stop, reluctantly, seeing, on the exam paper, gaps where you could have, should have, said more, places where, gulp, you have expressed something badly, or just plain wrongly, places where you know, just know, if you had a little more time, you could have impressed the examiner with your brilliance. But the clock has stopped, and all you can do is hand in your paper at the teacher’s desk before exiting with the crowd. If only you could have written faster.
