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'):
(Elegy for Leonard Cohen)
The end came
with a fall in the night:
sudden, unexpected,
peaceful.
Busy growing frail,
working diligently,
he felt the window
getting narrower.
His working pace was slow,
polishing for many years.
A new set of tracks
the morning he died:
spiritual wisdom;
dark, self-effacing wit.
( ... after the event,
not to know ... )
NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Twenty-Nine.
Prompt: to write a poem that takes its inspiration from the life of a musician, poet, or other artist. This is a found poem, in the form of an erasure of the article, 'For Leonard Cohen, the End Came With a Fall in the Night' by Ben Sisario, published in The New York Times, Nov. 16 2016.
Rather than 'find' and string together single words in a sea of erasures, I've used whole phrases from the text – though in a way that sometimes subtly alters fine shades of meaning.
I don’t recall music at Bill’s funeral. Maybe the boys didn’t think of that. They – only mid-twenties – arranged it all.
I was one year married to Andrew by then, and we’d recently moved interstate. Not only that: in the middle of moving house. (The first was just temporary to get us here.)
They delayed the funeral for me. ‘You have to be here.’
I supposed it would be odd if Andrew came too, and difficult for him. Anyway, someone had to finish our move.
The funeral felt strange. Some people didn’t know we’d ever parted. Others, because they did, didn’t know what to say. Two who never liked me stopped trying to hide it.
I couldn’t exactly play hostess. Not the grieving wife. (Did all my grieving over the divorce. Everyone thought that was my idea. No.)
A huddle of young Vietnamese women looked me over, whispering. Identifying me, I imagined.
I couldn’t guess which was the one he’d tried to brag about. (That didn't work. Someone already told me, and by then I didn’t care.)
Jim Cathcart (best mate) made the speech. Foster-son Robert, a parent himself then, sat beside me and sobbed. My arm stayed around his shoulders for the whole service.
My youngest, who’d driven me there, latched on to an ex-girlfriend come to pay her respects, and disappeared smartly, taking her to the wake instead.
I stood on my own in the car park as everyone drove away. Hailed an old friend just in time. ‘Room for me?’
Ah yes, there WAS music.
Much later. Unplanned.
Dutch was there with his guitar. As he’d always been, throughout my life with Bill. Playing for free at our parties – children’s and grown-ups’.
Some friends brought their kids this night. Late, when the youngsters were tired and fractious, he sang directly to them. ‘The fox went out on a chilly night …’ They listened with thumbs in their mouths, wide-eyed.
At parties, whenever Dutch called for requests, Bill would beg, ‘Play St James Infirmary’. Of course I asked, that final night. And he did.
Now Dutch is gone, and Andrew’s gone. Jim Cathcart’s gone. All the children are grown.
The music lingers on.
NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Twenty-Eight.
Prompt: to write about music at an event.
Linking to Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #176: Slice of Life. This little slice of death, written in April, is the nearest I can get to (my understanding of ) that literary style – which can also apply to fiction, but this is autobiographical.
– or maybe gender-neutral. Anyway,
they appear as whichever gender
we need them to be, at any time.
Take Archangel Chamuel here,
in this channelled painting
by Shavarnia, now on my wall.
This is the angel of pure love.
Gaze into the gentle face,
the wise and tender eyes,
and there you find Mother,
when you need mother-loving:
that warmth and tenderness.
Look in those eyes again
to see them calm and strong.
Now he’s elder brother,
guardian. The massive wings
deep with softness, firm with strength,
may enfold you as cradle or armour.
‘Gender’ is invisible; there’s no
specific core detail; only outward signs.
Pure love is not limited.
NaPoWriMo 2025, Day Twenty-Seven.
We were asked to write about a detail in a picture, and to begin with a broad declarative statement. Obviously, my statement is the title. But the particular detail I focus on, I finally declare non-existent.
