0900 Christmas day

The tinsel-scattered glitter
of Christmas-eve candlelight
is dispersed now,
turned to dust by the sunlight,
waiting to be swept up
with the crumpled wrapping-paper
littering the floor.

Outside, a few lazy cicadas are still warming up,
their
click-click-click – buzz… pause (repeat)
like a playing-field sprinkler,
steadies and merges with the background roar
of their thousand more punctual siblings.

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.

2300, still 30C / back of the envelope

dragged from sleep by the heat,
the still air drowning me,

0900, 30C

The westerly that has flowed,
cooling and caressing,
lulling us through the small hours,
has warmed already,
heated by its passage
across the already baking land.