eventually the streptocarpus will fall its sky petals to the quiet water below like the weight of all that beauty in the world becomes just too heavy to hold.
evening finds me walking gate to gate to door – checking ties and bolts closing porcupine from greens and genet from fowl. there is no sound but my breath and the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, sometimes goats quick chewing on hay. i don’t remember not loving here – even before i came. even before…
we summoned the change wind and it came like a slow salt beast, barnacle-skinned we summoned the change wind shaping our siren prayers – luminous, winged until our skin remembered the taste of rain we summoned the change wind and it came. A triolet for the Day 12 Napowrimo prompt to be found here…
and of course there had been flowers passed between them – fretful fingers plucking at language unlearned, accidentally unsaying the unspoken.
like a cup of water into sand i have poured myself – tasting the dry dust scrape of the thirst of this place. words cannot shape this thick tongued wind into longing when we don’t yet know we are lost. there is a river that runs sweet water to the ocean along the shore…
there is nothing to be found here but that that always was. breath hard against this new taste of cold, the moon no more than a smudge in a darkening sky. and yet even now this silence between rain squalls holds memories of nightjars trilling somersault wings among the stars.
she said the way her veil fell, the drape of cloth, the colour, was poetry. but i could not see what she saw and wondered which metaphor came first – falling veils and what we know about everything, about the world, about being women – and what is being hidden or revealed. or wearing poetry…
day ten of national lockdown finds me, sunday morning, pants rolled up above the knees – catching tadpoles on the clay bank of the garden swale. citizen science i tell myself silent giggling, squish mud intent – lurching after the the slippery platanna i had blind netted under the lily pad – though i…
i waited for the stars through the setting sun, lingering smell of bushfire painting feather clouds into bright birds. i waited for the stars because in dream, after the end of the world, when all that was needed was done, the stars came brighter than any stars i had seen before, like sunlight catching quiet…
how did the cicadas know to sing this strange summer – two days of bare arms, melted cats and the loud growing of greens, tendrilled peas pulling tender leaves up the trellis. sunday brings rain and we turn once more to the quieting of the year.