not now

I shan’t cry now,
not in the glare and noise of the supermarket,
between the breakfast spreads and the cereals.

I mustn’t cry now,
not in front of the children, flown from their school-day,
chattering urgently away, of lessons, games and he-said then I-said.

I can’t cry now,
not when there is no time, no time of my own, just the stove,
the table, and dinner waiting to be cooked and served.

I won’t cry now,
not when I am so tired, that my eyes close before the tears fall,
and there is nothing left of the day, and nothing left in me.

And maybe tomorrow, I wont need to cry.

0500, kookaburras and roosters

I cannot sleep with the window closed anymore.
I am stifled,
drowning in the bathwater-warm,
human-scented air.
Open,
all night a cool breeze drifts gently through the room,
carrying the melancholy sighs of a thousand eucalypts.
But before the sky even begins to lighten
to the silvered-grey hues of the brittlegums,
the kookaburras hurl their song through the window,
shattering my dreams into disconnected shards,
scattering their laughter
like seed-pearls.
Until the roosters add their shrill dissonance
to the raucously hilarious dawn,
compelling me to close the window.
And wonder
if my hatchet
needs sharpening.

fragments I: stones

I
Sun glitters on the ferry’s wake.
Its wash tumbles another cairn,
the clack of the stones
scatters amongst his laughter.

II
“I gave my father a stone,
to hold him here,
to remind him.”
I heard, yet I neglected to do the same.

III
Intricately wound and ornamented shells
shatter among rough glass and smooth stones.
Littoral becomes pocket kipple,
soon-forgotten, scattered and lost.

IV
The sharp edge planes the surface,
raising a glittering curtain, falling
as the stone skips onward.

 

Collected for the dVerse MTB prompt “picking up some pieces” – gathered partly from an old poem, with some new shards to form a fragment poem.

Tonomura tango

For the dVerse prompt “This one’s for you Bjorn“, set by Lilian in honour of Bjorn who is a (fellow) physicist, and requiring the use of a line from ABBA’s “dancing queen”.

So, here is a little nerdity for Bjorn:

 

Each double slit’s a sliding door,
to a strand within the multiverse, or…
Can’t decide, and no one’s looking?
Go through both, you’ll have them cooking,
up a theory on how you danced
through those doors – by choice or chance?
Do you expose a God’s immorality
with your fluttering waves of probability?
We’ve counters, film and CCD,
you think we’re blind, but you’ve been seen –
though you’re a teaser, you turn em on,
you sneaky little el-ec-tron.

Good things only #3 / sevenling (roses)

Finally the teaching-year is done for me, with just graduation to go next week.   So I’m hoping to find more time for reading and writing now.

It’s been a challenging year, and the last few months in particular have been difficult. So here is a floral pick-me-up, for myself and anyone else who needs to stop and smell the roses.

1.  The lilies are just starting to bloom! First the Asiatics, but soon the Orientals and trumpets will be blooming too!

2. Hearts-ease – also known as Johnny-jump-ups or violas – are in bloom in all sorts of unexpected places. These first snuck into my garden ten years ago as stow-aways in a pot of something else, and they’ve spread to come up year after year in pots and bathtubs and garden beds.

for L_, who I trust and respect

I didn’t go to his funeral. Even if I could have, I would not have gone. Funerals are for the living,

fair is a four letter word

For the dVerse Monday quadrille (poem in 44 words exactly) prompt “let’s go to the fair” (include the word fair): 

 

“It’s not fair, I’m not tired yet!”
“It’s not fair, vegetables are disgusting!”
“It’s not fair, showers are boring!”
“It’s not fair, everyone else has that game!”

“Why are you so unfair?” 

From the mouth of a child,
fair is a four letter word.

what I wanted to say…

…in my Friday and weekend emails and “chats” to the 10% of my colleagues who cause 90% of the problems because they either ignore the grade submission deadline, discover they don’t know how to use the system until after the deadline and expect help on the weekend, or are just too bloody ODD to do anything properly and on time without having to be asked five times and then argue about it:  

 

I’m the parent that’s less fun

(the one that makes you brush your teeth)

I’m the teacher that’s more mean

(the one that won’t let you in the lab barefoot)

I’m the director that sends the angry emails

(the one that makes sure marks come in)

 

Or here’s another way of looking at it,

I’m the one that:

keeps the kids healthy,

the students safe,

and makes sure the system works.

 

Did you ever think that maybe I get tired of

     being the grown up?

     being the responsible one?

     being the bad guy?

and would like to not give a shit about

dental costs,

legal liability and

graduations,

either?

 

Did you ever stop to think that if you

JUST

DO

YOUR

FUCKING

JOB

then I won’t have to be the bad guy?

 

Let’s do the experiment and see what happens.

 

memory is a fickle friend

One of these days I’ll get up early enough to join a dVerse OLN live session… in the meantime, asynchronous will have to do.
This started as a line in my last poem, that a couple of people said they liked.

 

Memory is a fickle friend at best,
at worst, a false witness.

Like a blind man asking
a confidante to describe a photograph,
we ask her to tell us our past.

But she cannot.
The past is gone.

So memory,
like a historical novelist,
must construct a story from the scraps –
one true enough that the lies don’t catch our eyes,
one false enough that we can stomach it.

And so she obfuscates and extrapolates,
filling in and filtering,
redacting and recolouring
to give us what we want
(or maybe what we need):
a past revised to suit our today.

in the moonlight of other nights

For the dVerse “in the light of other days” prompt, a request to share a memory, recent or past.  This is a little of both, and the possum shown in the pictures here, that I took last night, may well have been the baby of an earlier season’s “poss”.

Poss has come visiting again.

Caught in the torchlight
she runs up a post
only to discover her way blocked.

Was there no roof here last time she visited?
Or has she forgotten?

Memory is a fickle friend,
hers and mine.