Seemingly [Prose]

Seemingly 

‘We’re going to be such great friends,’ she said, ’I can tell.’

And so it seemed. 

She too loved the land, the animals, the wild ocean. Our opinions matched on many things.

For a time we shared secrets, as part of a therapeutic writing course. We hoped this might make us brave enough to turn buried hurts into art. (It didn’t, not quite, but at least it seemed we were less alone.)

I ignored some tiny ways she tried to influence my thinking. It wasn’t as if she could. (Anyway, on most things it seemed we agreed.) She never pushed … just tried again in a new way, later – which again I sidestepped. (It surprises me, now, that we never directly addressed this. But after all, it seemed so small.)

An issue arose in our locality, which divided friends and neighbours. One turned on me, yelling fierce, ridiculous accusations. After a moment of shock, I refuted each allegation with icy politeness. My accuser, having no actual facts, blustered a bit and left. I sat down, shaking. Someone brought me a glass of water. Someone else patted my shoulder.

My ‘great friend’ stayed silent throughout this tirade. Then she too left abruptly.

Thereafter, when we encountered each other, she refused to acknowledge me. She would even cross to the other side of the street. She sided, it seemed, with my accuser. 

I’d always sensed disapproval from the accuser, so when I got over the shock I was philosophical. After all, she’d never pretended to be my friend.

But the other – that hurt. Her seeming friendship, I realised, must indeed have been pretence.

Sometimes we still met, uncomfortably, at events. She’d ignore me. I tried to avoid her. Then I thought, ‘No, I have a right to be here.’ I started greeting her in passing, getting in her face but not waiting for replies. Finally I turned up at a fund-raiser she was hosting, knowing she’d be forced to speak to me –welcomingly – in the reception line. She put a good face on it, seemingly genuine.  

‘Gotcha!’ I thought. 

But the triumph felt hollow. Time to let go, move on.

From appearances, now, it would seem we never knew each other.

A 369-word story for Writers' Pantry #9 at ‘Poets and Storytellers United’.
(Is it autobiography? Not exactly. Is it fiction? Not altogether.)

Red Fruit

Red Fruit

In the warm lands where I live,
fruit is golden-fleshed
(whether or not yellow-skinned):
slick paw-paws veering to orange;
pale, almost-white bananas;
lush mangoes pulsing with juice.…

In cooler climes, the stone fruits
and the berries – some of both –
present us with red: rich, definite,
wrapping their surfaces (nectarines,
cherries...) or red all through
(raspberries, loganberries...).

Strangely, when I bite into
a dark-skinned, red-fleshed plum,
or crush a raspberry
softly with my tongue
to explode against my palate,
it doesn’t feel like eating heat.

It feels like delicious coolness, like
a drink that is better than a drink.
I savour that sensation all the way down
my back and my front, from throat to toes.
The soles of my feet curl up
as my heart opens, expands.

On the other hand, gorging
the sun-gold fruit of the tropics
is indeed like tasting warmth:
slurping, savouring, swallowing
slices of the sun. All are paradisial;
I’ll only say – they’re prettier, the red.

Written for Sanaa's Weekly Scribblings #8: Red Fruit Rendition at Poets and Storytellers United.

Image: free clip art.

Ocean

Ocean

‘My dear,’ she wrote, ‘You wouldn’t believe
how the light comes in across the ocean.’

‘Oh yes,’ I replied, ‘I live beside an ocean –
the distant shore, indeed, of the same ocean.’

‘I have kinship with this piece of land,’ she explained,
‘forged in childhood – therefore, too, with the ocean.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘I grew up on a small island
edged in all directions by one or another ocean.’

‘You could never understand,’ she went on,
‘what it is to be beloved of the ocean.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I expect not. I am merely a supplicant,
offering my respects to this vast, changing ocean.

‘I love to watch its jewel colours shift and interplay,
and the whales further out, travelling their own ocean.

‘I like to walk the winter sand, the tide teasing my feet
with frothy kisses: an enticing, dangerous ocean.

‘Or else to sit high on the cliff while storm clouds
gather and swell and lower, merging with the ocean.

‘I can’t live far inland, on the flat. I need mountains,
a quick river, and a breeze redolent of ocean.’

She said, ‘I understand that yours
is a flat, scrubby country far from the ocean.

‘I have read about your country. It sounds
interesting, different. One day I’ll cross the ocean.

‘Then you can show me your desert. It will be
fascinating for me, whose home is girt by ocean.’

This is fiction, which grew out of a completely different instance of speaking and not being heard.  However, when I visited America in 2006, I was astonished by how many people informed me that I live in a flat, treeless country. Since the recent bushfires, I think people do now know that we have trees – if only because so many of them got burned. And of course it is true that we have a large interior desert (known as the Outback); but it's also true that the vast majority of us live around the coastal fringe. (For those who wouldn't pick up the reference, the last line has a small irony in that the Australian national anthem, 'Advance Australia Fair' says that OUR home is 'girt by sea.')

I grew up on the island of Tasmania, and now live on the east coast of mainland Australia, where this photo was taken. It's by delightful coincidence that it echoes the photo Magaly uses in her Writers' Pantry #8 at Poets and Storytellers United, where I'm sharing this poem. (Also linking to earthweal's Open Link Weekend #8.)

After the fires and after the rain ...

After the fires and after the rain …


Plant, I don’t know you,
never saw you before.
Yet here you are
fully arrived
on my garden path –
and in it,
in that widening crack
in the rain-damaged concrete;
your leaves bedraggled, thin,
full of holes like nibbles
from something that must have been
eating you little by little … and yet
your flowers so white they shine.

Your flowers,
so white they startle
so radiant they cause delight,
seem like a message.
Yes, they say, life can come back,
can emerge from the dark
and grow,
even apparently from nowhere
from nothing. 
Two days later you’re gone, 
vanished as if you’d never been –
but leaving, like scent lingering, 
that heart-expanding shine.


In Weekly Scribblings #7 at Poets and Storytellers United, Rommy invites us to pay tribute. I'm thinking this poem also suits the current earthweal challenge, Finding Hope.

On Being Asked to Depict the Snow Moon

On Being Asked to Depict the Snow Moon

What a cold, mysterious moon that must be.

I imagine her: starkest white, beautifully aloof,

like Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen. 

When I was very young, living in a cold climate,

I became afraid. I feared that a shard of ice

would lodge itself in my heart and freeze me.

My beautiful, distant mother was unable

to hug a child spontaneously — or indeed

to be anything spontaneous. So you see.

Instead I kept, defiant, a secret spark in my heart,

a hidden fire to warm myself from the inside.

And eventually I escaped. Now I inhabit sunlight.

In this fertile, sub-tropical home, we don’t know cold

as they do who live where winter comes with snow.

There is no such thing, here, as a snow moon. 

I shiver at the mere thought, and will forego, 

forevermore, such terrible, heart-halting beauty.

The moon here is a warm, embracing Goddess. 

Written to serve instead of a picture for the February #witchwithme challenge on Instagram.

Self-Love on Valentine's Day

Self-Love on Valentine’s Day

I linger over smooth, dark chocolate

read love poems, reminisce ... and enjoy

a happy-ever-after movie on TV.

I give myself pink roses (traditionally
a symbol of friendship, not passion). 

The pink have the sweetest scent.

Sharing with Writers' Pantry #7 at Poets and Storytellers United

River, Mist, and a Child

River, Mist, and a Child

This poem is light striping a river.

This poem is mist festooning the hills.

This poem is a child falling in love with a landscape.

This poem is a wide swathe of pale gold light

falling in a straight line athwart a silvery river

at the last edge of daylight, as the child watches.

This poem is thick ribbons of curling, billowing mist

lying in parallel pockets along the sides of the hills

which ring the valley, as the child wakes up and sees.

This poem is a child entranced by evening and morning,

a child who lives in a valley alongside a curving river,

a child who likes to watch the endlessly changing play of light.

This poem is light gradually fading on a darkening river.

This poem is the mist thinning, vanishing off the broad hills.

This is me, far from my childhood, lost in remembering.


Written for Writers' Pantry #6 at Poets and Storytellers United
and shared with open link weekend #6 at earthweal. 
The form, invented by Hannah Gosselin, is called Boomerang Metaphors.

A Few Flowers

A Few Flowers

There are small gullies – little more
than dents in the landscape –
which the fires, amazingly, missed.
Here, already, tiny shoots put forth
and even a few flowers.

The rest of the ground
has been scorched hard,
has become stone.
(I do not exaggerate.)
Nothing will grow on those hectares.

‘The Australian bush,’
optimists remind us,
‘regenerates after fire.’
It’s not as simple as that.
Depends what kind of fire, and where.

Depends what kind of vegetation
whether it will regenerate, and how.
Some ancient trees will never grow again.
Never be seen again. Nothing
will bring them back.

‘Re-introduce koalas to the wild,’
the optimists advocate.
What wild? Do you not understand
the huge loss of habitat? Do you not
know of all the other unique, bereft creatures?

As the fire front bore down on them,
cattle dropped suddenly dead
from instant loss of oxygen.
The fire ate the oxygen out of the air.
(Still, better than burning to death.)

And yet – into the big deep burrows
that are home to wombats
came birds, lizards, wallabies,
all manner of living beings crowding in,
and the wombats made room.

Although, when they emerged,
it was to nowhere – the trees now sticks,
the earth stone – there are some narrow,
missed strips of grass; there are
those tiny gullies, those few wildflowers.


Written for Sanaa's Weekly Scribblings #5: A Mouthful Of Flowers at Poets and Storytellers United. And shared at the earthweal Weekly Challenge: Renewal.

In case you're in any doubt – this is not fictional.
As mentioned in the poem, re wombat burrows (but added later): see for yourself.

In the Dystopia

In the Dystopia

In the dystopia, our houses
are scooped out underground.
We think it makes them fire-safe,
but no-one knows quite how to solve
the problem of where our air comes in –
when the air is falling ash.
And then there’s the question
of what might happen
to a house underground in a flood.

In the dystopia, when it began,
I wanted to wait for you –
but your legs were twisting as they burned
and you couldn’t keep up. The trees fell
to block your path, and I didn’t even know.
I was running. I’m still running.

In the dystopia, we’re going to need hope.
We can die out – even from despair.
Luckily, the day-to-day living
eats up our time and attention
with its many small accommodations.
Just the simple foraging for food
takes effort, and the calculations
about avoiding gas pockets
or the choking remnants of smoke
in the lingering fires ... and the fires!

They can turn suddenly, the fires,
appearing to chase whatever still lives
as if they had volition. We can’t
second-guess their vagaries, but we try.
Not as if we can’t see them coming!
We have become faster runners,
those of us not too starved and exhausted.
(Those of us distant enough to have time to run.)

In the dystopia, there’s little strength to spare
for conversation, or the banding together
in tribes — yet we do huddle, when we can,
in small, almost-silent clusters. We’ve lost
the will for relationship. Yet still
we cuddle our children, those that survived.

In the dystopia, the children,
not knowing a different way,
still exclaim at a struggling flower
or a stray bird — which we adults, now,
see merely as food. The children
have sometimes been heard singing.
They learnt it all by themselves.
Perhaps it’s natural for humans
to make those happy noises
when we haven’t been wrung dry.

In the dystopia, we don’t know
who or what is over the next hill,
let alone in any other countries.
We don’t know if there are
any other countries. We only know
that, near the coast, mountainous waves
came and quenched the fires there.
But we can’t live near a coast
of such frequent tsunamis,
or the crocodiles closer inland
and very much further south.

In the dystopia
no-one stops to write poems.
(Although ...
some of the children....)



Written for Brendan's earthweal Open Link Weekend #5, where he invites us to turn in our writing from 'wrongness' to Renewal.  I tried, I really did....  Well, there is a little suggestion there. I hope that – in all contexts – it might be enough.

Also sharing with Writers' Pantry #5 at Poets and Storytellers United, where Magaly talks about light at the end of a tunnel – a real, practical, in-the-world, here-and-now light.