mirror, mirror

I tell the woman in the mirror:
“You’re not who I set out to be.”
She looks at me, somewhat askance
and then she whispers back at me
“Nor are you”
then goes on to say
“but if we stick together we’ll be okay.”

 

Written for the dVerse quadrille “mirror, mirror on the wall” prompt. 

small hours

I dread these “small” hours
these dark hours
these interminable hours,
stretching unbearably
while I watch for the line
between windowsill and blind to lighten

and I am envious
envious to the point of madness
of all these around me
wrapped in their cosy blanket of sleep

it will not come to me
it creeps near,
comes tapping on my scalp like rain
but this impermeable skull keeps me in
and keeps sleep out

hour after hour
all these small hours

I am starving at the feast-

they take their little slice of death
to see them fresh for another day
and I look on at their placid faces,
hear their slow, satisfied breaths
and envy them until I hate them

until I no longer wish to join them
but just for there to be no more days

and no more “small” hours

mezza luna

For the dVerse Monday haibun prompt, to write about the half-moon or “Mezza Luna”:

 

I hardly noticed the change. Just a few days ago there was a thin finger-nail clipping of a moon, hanging above the horizon at sunset, gleaming white against a purple velvet sky. Now on my evening walk she is overhead, a neat half-circle, the terminator drawn with a sharp pencil. And in another week I will see her rise, plump and full, climbing above the ridge to the east as the sun drops below the ridge to the west.
They run in circles, chasing each other above this still Earth. But you can see that she wants to be caught, because she runs a little slower than the sun to let him catch up. But, oh… every time, every time… he runs past her.

Mezza Luna points,
her sunlit face an arrow
aiming at her love

least said…

Curiosity is an irritation,
an itch in the back of the mind.
Oh, the temptation to scratch it…
to break the heavy silence
between light and flippant remarks,
to type but not delete this time.
But…
Don’t ask questions
you don’t want the answer to.
Better to let the irritation fade to a tickle,
than scratch it and leave an open wound.

Good things only #5: last week’s highlights

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a “good things only” post. But last week had a few highlights I wanted to record.

On Thursday on my evening walk I noticed a bat hanging on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence. One prong of wire had gone through a wing and it was pretty well stuck. I thought it was dead, especially given it had been a really hot day and it must have been there since the previous night.  But when I started trying to get it loose, thinking I’d take it home for the kids to see, it turned its head and opened its mouth at me. I managed to get it loose and took it back to the house where it had a drink of water from an egg cup before flying away. I’d never held a bat before, or even seen one that close up. It was such a tiny, beautiful creature.

 

Then on Friday I got an unusual compliment. I think it was a compliment, anyway. As I was coming out of my office, someone knocking on the next door said “I like you hair! It’s the same colour as the undercoat on the F-35”. Which says something about my workplace… it may be frustrating to the point of infuriating at times, but it’s generally interesting at least.

Sunday was the Goulburn poultry auction. What more need be said? What could more exciting than that?  Even if none of the birds I bought can fly.  😀

thank you for cleaning the bathroom sink

For the dVerse Valentine’s day prompt “come and state it plainly“, and for D.  

I don’t love you every day.
You know as well I do
that if I said so I would be lying.
There are days when the irritation
from brushing against each other
day after day
year after year
is like contact dermatitis,
that is never allowed to heal
but just gets more annoying,
until I have to scratch it.
But this constant abrasion
has carved us into shapes
that fit together.
Most days.
 

 

hare turned tortoise

A haibun for the dVerse Monday haibun prompt, “heart“:

 

Ba-doonk-a-doonk, Ba-doonk-a-doonk. Eight-thirty p.m. and my phone alarm is flashing “take meds”.
The tablet snaps in the cutter, and the two halves fall neatly apart: two 25mg doses of atenolol. There is a satisfying definiteness to that snap, a decisive counting out and finalising of the days with this miniature guillotine. (I am always tempted to run my thumb along the little razor blade to test its sharpness, but I do not. At least, I have not so far.) It clicks down SNAP! and another day is gone, decapitated, and dropped into the little plastic box below the blade.
I am no longer measuring out my life with coffee spoons – I am not allowed caffeine anymore – but with half-tablets of heart medication.

The rabbit is tamed:
it twitches rather than kicks
and plods tortoise-paced.

(or:

My heart no longer
skips a beat when I see you
(if I take my meds).
)

1000 January 30th, last day of summer holidays

10 o’clock and all the have-tos are done,
a hundred should-dos, but not a single one
appeals as a use of a summer day
and so another one just drifts away.
The list of could-dos has items still
but the days, though long, so easily fill
with things that are almost the want-to kind,
until of a sudden we look ahead and find
those endless days that seemed so long
have rushed right past, and summer is gone.

 

I saved up all my annual leave in 2022 so I could take most of January off while the kids were on school holidays. Tomorrow they go back to school and I go back to work, and there are so many things we didn’t get around to doing. Even little things – I meant to spend more writing, do a bit of painting, more gardening. I didn’t even take my clarinet out of its case. But I guess I really needed to do a whole lot of nothing after last year. Now I feel almost ready to go back into the fray, but I’d still rather not. sigh 

winter melts

Winter lies sadly melting in the sink.
An ice-blue sky reduced to an anonymous puddle
in a plastic zip-lock bag.
And for what?
To make way for bargain priced minced meat.
“I’m sorry” I say to the little one,
who just shrugs.
And for a moment I consider telling her:
“It remembers what it was. Water remembers.”
But I do not say it,
because she is not so little anymore,
and would just roll her eyes and say “muuummm”
at such sappy Disney bullshit.
She accepts that snow must make way
for ‘reduced to clear’ minced meat.
And I am sorry for that.

Written for the dVerse prompt “poetics: the blizzard of the self“, to write a poem about winter. I used a bit of poetic licence here, it was actually a bag of hailstones rather than snow that was taken out of the freezer a while ago to make space for ‘reduced to clear’ meat. But snow somehow fitted better with the broader theme than giant hailstones which are themselves due to climate change.
 

1200 December 14th, Goulburn railway bridge

Paint a primary-coloured afternoon:
green, green trees –
not the dull yellow-grey-khaki of eucalypts
but the bright clear greens of picture-book trees.
Dab them with circles of pink and yellow,
to make a thousand tiny plums like Christmas baubles.
Add a sweep of black road
rising in a hump over a railway line,
don’t forget the white lines emphasising the curve.
Now fill in the sky,
just blue, and more blue, and more
until the page is so saturated
it cannot hold any more.
Finish with some fine details:
a pair of train-spotters with their cameras
leaning on the bridge railing, waiting.
Now, save this picture:
fill a bag with blue and green, pink and yellow,
sweet-tart, glossy-smooth but dusty from a passing train,
take it home and pour it into jars,
and add them to the pantry-album of summer afternoons.