Spring comes. And with it a silent drift of gold. I sing the old John Williamson song about Cootamundra Wattles and take too many photos of their great yellow tassels. I find their echoes later around finger prints on the car. Adrift, adrift. We don’t know what we breathe until it lands on the right … Continue reading Cootamundra Wattle
Feeling stupid after an email conversation, I go out to exercise the dog. The oval lies over-sheened with western sun. Light billows like a sheet, particulate and all-pervasive until I shade my eyes. The dog scoots, mostly ignoring the ball which I throw for my own exercise, walking on and to pick it up and … Continue reading Warp & Weft
We stand by the school gate, pasted around with framed faces. She is talkative. He is European. And the other one is mostly silent, somewhat of a black sheep. I feel like a black sheep too, not even daring to hope for happiness. I lean against the fence, my aching hips and the how-to-vote cards … Continue reading Election Day
Unsheathed from its special box - Japanese steel, sworled and beautiful... and there! The pumpkin cubes easily, orange blocks forming a chopping-board city. Shush shush shush, the mushrooms fall into slivers which are scraped into the baking tray atop the pumpkin, and zucchini pieces topple in too, green-backed moons. Top and tail beetroots, the whiskered … Continue reading Dinner
In the yard that used to be for the cats, I provide shelter for one tiny chicken. It scampers between my feet like it would with its real mother, and I must watch my every step. It’s growing feathers at a rapid rate and knows how to clean them and how to take dust baths … Continue reading Chick ‘n’ Chirrup
Einstein In the south we’re faking it with an electric spring, bulb bright and crumbed with sawdust. To cheep feels like love and so we huddle over the warm box, giving lonely little Einstein our eyes, fingers, food, and the chickiest noises we can utter. Jerry from ACT Wellness rings to see how we’re coping … Continue reading Growing up cute…
Across the Sky On the couch, drenched in a purple sleeping bag, my daughter mutters “brothers these days!” and I have to agree. He’s a good ‘un, full bottle on the button pressing and unruffled as blue sky. I join in the niggling, first on her side, then on his and we finish all smiling … Continue reading Twiglet #273
Near the music school on Monday evening, the great oaks, arms as thunderous as Thor’s, are still mainly green. Sometimes a leaf drifts down, swooping from side to side to land, light and bright, on the damp grass. A man walks by, bent awkwardly from some medical cause, in a baseball shirt several sizes too … Continue reading A Monday in March
Write about the weather in Present Tense These last few days, everyone is saying “Thank goodness for the sun!” People are stretching like cats, long skin and whiskers pleased. It’s true the summer has been a wet one. Canberra wringing in a wet towel, warmth like dogs breath fogging up the sky. Mosquitoes are having … Continue reading #Go Dog Go Haibun Wednesday
As my eyes open to the grey stocktake of another morning, I wonder “Is it all still true?”. It’s not really hope but it still hurts when it goes away. I tell myself that I understand the facts. I drum the story like fingers on a desk. But even in the face of loss, only … Continue reading Mind Tricks
When we reached the trig station, I took a wrong turn. We headed down a ridge, winding out of the trees and into land that must’ve once been pine forest but was cleared at least a few years ago. It was now full of purple-green blackberry mounds, stringy little saplings, the splayed denuded heads of … Continue reading My Morning
Our children are saying to us “What does it matter if this person is a boy or a girl? Who cares? A person is a person.” My daughter said it to me. And my friend’s daughter (ten years older) said it to her. In their generation, the garden is more important than the appearance of … Continue reading Haibun for Hope
Evening Drive Driving on hill tops, the landscape is generous – unfiltered mapwork filling up the thirsty eye. This evening the horizon is thickly sponged – dark cloud bruises, gleaming chrome sky, the felt silhouette of mountains and, in the foreground, rolling khaki with wave-crest fences. At a fork, I’m sent on a detour. Here … Continue reading #dVerse Haibun “Cold Mountain”
I wasn’t born this way. I’ve had to grow a lot of skin. But even still, I’ll pull the house apart for band aids. Sometimes at night, if the breeze blows just the right way across my nose, I can smell 1985. It’s jasmine sweet and ticked over with corrugated iron creep and the piney … Continue reading Grief
I stare out the car window at apparently limitless construction. Perhaps we resonate with skeletons, our new suburbs percolating out of them; the pulse and jut of naked road spindles and the bony reckoning of houses. Natural birthing prefers a wholeness – skins folded and pliable like petals, birds' wings, a snail’s antenna or the … Continue reading Build Your House Around My Body
In year 3, we had Mrs P. I loved her and wanted her to love me. I took her gifts of apples, flowers and stories of my home life. Her skirts were the nesting grounds of a dozen cheeping girls. In year 4 we had Miss K. Together we buried the word “nice” in the … Continue reading Wednesday Haibun
Through the pine forest, tilled light in measured shafts. Pale weeds grab at it, such greedy luminescence. The mulch is thick underfoot and my own words reverberate in my ears “life includes death”. Right here on the forest floor, death is making life again - brown and rich as magnificence. It occurs to me that … Continue reading Haibun – In the Forest
A raindrop in a cloud thinks that’s life, floating there in sagacious blue, fraternising with other raindrops and the blessing of the sun. Floating there on the ratty, tatty edge of nothing at all. Not knowing of rain. Not knowing of its imminent fall. Then, quite suddenly, there’s swirling and grinding and the cloud’s in … Continue reading Haibun on a Raindrop
I am pulling weeds. Rip, rip, rip. Weeding where pavers butt and crack, where the beaten strength of human engineering gives way to wiggle; to root snake and trunk push… to Earth’s breath. My feet are surrounded by endless rectangles, like I’m sewn in with patchwork trousers, imitating the cellulose structure of plants. Do the … Continue reading January Haibun
We walked into Christmas in the slow way that days do when you’re waiting. By five pm on Christmas Eve I could see the drag on my son’s face. I thought this time thing, it needs a new bus driver. Two weeks of crawl and the long long night-light shadows creeping into the hall from … Continue reading Haibun Monday – Celebration
From where I stand, washing dishes in a rectangular plastic tub, I can see the roiling approach of buff-shouldered clouds – a bellicose sky. A shard of lightning rips a fierce line down the purple horizon and I flinch, searingly aware of my metal watch. I take off all my jewellery and put it in … Continue reading Camp in Finke River National Park
Written for Frank's Haibun Monday at dVerse - topic: Writer's Block Sometimes an idea flares in the brain – spontaneous combustion – and it’s big and bright and I bask in its wonderful glow. But when that’s used up, it’s easy to think that every idea will be like that – intense and consuming, shimmering … Continue reading Spark Blindness
August follows from a grey and fearful July – the closed hatch of cities in lock-down. Concrete and buildings hunkered under shifty, flannelette skies. The grime of recycled messages from haggard, mesh-faced leaders. Closed front doors, a stultifying blank. Resentment breeds as fast as the virus itself. Different areas, different rules. Anger like pavement cracks … Continue reading August – Haibun Monday
In this expatriate village on this small Indonesian Island, where the road tar bubbles like tiny lungs in the hot sun and where the low waves blunder greyly into shore, this is where I grow up between a bejungled golf course and a cul de sac. We do our schooling by correspondence – Clive Corro … Continue reading A Walk down Memory Lane
Out of the Cave 