It Wasn’t Me Who Had the Epiphany

I kept bursting into tears! It was our first visit to Bali – me, Bill, and our two little boys. It was 1974, the tourist boom just beginning. We visitors would collectively alter that Paradise beyond retrieval … but we didn’t know so then. It was still unchanged. A naked family, showering under a roadside run-off, waved unembarrassed as our taxi passed.

the setting sun

falling slowly into

a wide flat sea

‘Island of the Gods’ the tourist books called it. We agreed. Enraptured as I was, why was I constantly bursting into sudden tears? 

We read the histories. Some postulated combined ancestry, Indian and Chinese. Later writers say those influences arose more from trade visitations. We could still find old Chinese coins, with holes in the middle, dropped in the street. I brought home three to use with my I Ching.

Suddenly Bill got it. ‘It’s the Indian in you!’ 

My maternal grandmother was mixed-race Anglo-Indian. (I have to add ‘mixed race.’ There are other definitions of the term, from the time of the Raj: one meaning completely English but living long in India, a second meaning completely Indian but thoroughly adopting British culture.)

He was right. It burst on me as revelation. It wasn’t the people but the artefacts. I was re-experiencing things I’d grown up with, lost along with my childhood. I was eating out of bowls I ate from in my grandparents’ home, I was surrounded by reminiscent ornaments, I was admiring familiar designs on cloth … 

There were connections with Chinese artefacts too. My mother’s family had put in there on the long boat trip from India to Tasmania, and bought some pieces. 

I’ll pass to descendants the carved Indian-silver containers and vases, the polished bamboo bowls with Chinese dragons painted around their outsides.

My Dutch-born husband wanted to visit Indonesia for the soul connection to an ancestor who had lived there and left diaries. I didn’t care. I hadn’t been out of Australia; I was happy to go anywhere. How odd that it was I who fell into connection with my Asian roots (who never got seventies Bali out of my blood for evermore). But …

I never returned 

to the isle of the gods –

vanished

Written for Haibun Monday: Epiphany at dVerse.

SM

The Smell of Suntan Lotion

The smell of suntan lotion, 

and I’m straight back

to that beach in Bali

that afternoon, with Bill

and our little boys.

It was 1973, our first

holiday outside Australia.

We were carefree, 

and full of wonder. 

We still loved each other.

Written for Friday Writings #93: Scent of a Poem at Poets and Storytellers United.

The Blurring of the Days

The Blurring of the Days

To Bill

Each night the clicking comes
of the small gecko on the wall
outside my front door. I hear it
as friendly and comforting. A mark
of the progress of my day, the hours
of my day, each day the same
sound at the same awaited time.

It takes me back to those days in Bali
with the loud clack of the huge
geckos in walls of straw,
strange yet amusing, reliable
backdrop to steamy nights …
at the same time as it grounds me
here and now. How the days slip by! 

Written for Weekly Scribblings #48: Words of an Unprecedented Year, at Poets and Storytellers United. One of the words is Blursday, for days indistinguishable from each other. I have experienced some of this during the pandemic isolation – but that gecko, one of the things that gives my days sameness, took me somewhere else, to a different kind of blurring which is perhaps more common as we age.