I’m very occupied.
Honestly.
How?
Telling that
needs greater honesty.
Almost unknown to myself
I decided:
The time left – mine! –
I choose to use
indulgently.
Once
I did the needful things.
Now I laze about,
reading, eating …
occupied in selfish pleasure
if I’m honest.
Written for dVerse Quadrille #226 – Honestly!
(A dVerse invention, the Quadrille must be exactly 44 words, excluding title, and must include one specific word – in this case, 'honest'.)
I walk out my door
and look straight across at mountains
jutting behind the houses over the road.
Really, they loom
on the other side of our town, and beyond
paddocks and canefields, trees and river.
But this hill I’m on,
up the top here, takes my sight leaping
past the valley to the craggy range
(the Border Ranges)
filling the width of my vision, which rises
to encompass also the height of the sky.
‘The bright of the sky’
my hand types, and I nearly keep that.
At present it’s clear, cold winter-bright.
The mountain edge
is sharp, as if carved with a knife.
Below is a row of trees topping the hill.
Somewhere else
the globe is warming, ice caps melt,
the ocean is filling with plastic.
Some other time,
not now, the rivers fill too full
drowning the land; or forests burn.
For a moment I forget
the horrors of wars, starvation, pestilence.
They will return too soon. Meanwhile
I open my door.
I gaze at the mountains opposite, deepest blue.
(I dribble a little, being old. It doesn’t matter.)
Written for Poetics: A View of One's Own, at dVerse.
Piercing unaccompanied voice.
A sad-faced man in close-up
in a movie seen on TV, some years
after it was made. And after I'd learned,
close up, what ‘Stir Crazy’ could mean.
Send it by mail … And we did.
All the letters eventually burned,
but I can still quote them … still
hear your voice in my head. Speaking,
not singing. Lifting off the page.
Put your arms ’round me,
give my heart ease. Something
to dream of, if you’d been free.
Roses love sunshine. You wrote me
poems full of roses: and in one letter
a small pressed flower, called
hearts-ease. A half-joking scrawl
in the margin, ‘Well, I din’t ’ave
no roses.’ Angels in heaven
know I love you. All my life long,
any time, without warning,
a sweet-sounding folksong –
plaintive, haunting – in that movie clip,
or in the voice of Burl Ives, or
Glenn Campbell, or Johnny Cash …
or your voice, or mine. Plunging me
instantly, again, down in the valley,
the valley so low. Where a dead man
waits in remembrance. (Send it
in care of the Birmingham Jail.)
It surprised me that my final poem this April would turn out to be this. I guess something still needed expression. The back story is in my memoir Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of Darkness and Light, published in paperback 2023 and available from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. To be made available on Amazon as an ebook in 2025.
(This video from the movie begins with the end of another song before going into 'Down in the Valley'):