remember when the drought broke?

For the dVerse Monday quadrille prompt “pouring out our poems“. A quadrille is exactly 44 words, and for this prompt had to contain the word water.  

 

Remember when the drought broke?
How we followed the gully
down from the house to the waterfall place
overflowing with the laughter, relief –
the dry years’ strain and restraint
discarded with our clothes
in the recklessness of water,
the profligacy of the flood?

 

February 2022, between the bushfires and COVID. 

3 things / what colour is hope?

For the dVerse prompt “what colour is hope“, to write a poem about 3 things that make you happy:

 

Hope is blue –
the blue of sky
mirrored in every puddle,
and in every full dam
when the drought has broken.

Hope is russet brown –
the brown-paper skin
on a tulip bulb
ready to be nestled
into rich black soil.

Hope is yellow –
the yellow of the leaping flames
of this sympathetic magic
with which we call back the sun
on this shortest day of the year.

 

 

after the flood, chainsaws

After the flood
when the hiluxes have been dragged from the gullies
and the roads are cleared and open in town,
when the water is mopped from living rooms
and the ‘roos are drying along the roadsides
when the sheep are washed white as cotton wool
and the cockatoos are muddy as street urchins
when the gum-leaves glitter in the afternoon sun
and the water has fallen so that we can stride into the creek –
then
while the three-legged dog watches
(though we are hardly drovers’ wives),
we take our chainsaws,
and we clear the path
home.

We got 80mm of rain in a few hours Thursday-week ago, which might not sound like a huge amount but with all the rain we’ve had recently the soil is saturated, the dams are full and there was nowhere for it to go. My neighbour was sending me texts on her way (trying to get) home of closed roads, vehicles large and small washed off and people being rescued. We live at the end of a dirt road past a creek crossing that floods a few times a year – and this time it was not only flooded, a tree had washed across it. She couldn’t get across until morning, when she waded across to where her three-legged dog was sitting in the cold waiting for her. I was home, but my family had stayed in Canberra to avoid the floods.  In the afternoon, when the water had dropped enough, we each took a chainsaw and cleared the tree together.  In the photo above you can see the “tide-line” just in front of the vehicle (well above the mud-line) where the water got to.  Today we got another 40mm of rain, and it flooded again but nowhere near as high.   

boule de neige

I have brought it with me,
down from the hills
where the snow shrouds the ground
between monochrome trees.
I have brought it with me,
down through the fog
that blankets the valley
like a cloud stretched in sleep.
I have brought it with me,
to where snow gives way to grass
beneath technicolour trees
and petals dust the ground.
I have brought it with me
down from the hills
and down through the fog
from winter to spring.
I have brought it with me, for you.
But while I looked for you
it melted away,
melted away to just a cupful of water.
Just a cupful of water,
like any other.

This is for the Tuesday dVerse prompt “naming the rose“, and the challenge is to write a poem titled or using the name of a rose from the list provided. The rose I chose was boule de neige, which means “ball of snow”. It reminded me of a poem I wrote a few years ago when we had a sudden flurry of snow in spring, and I took a cupful of it to work with me for a friend. When I got to work my car still had snow on the roof (because my damn heater didn’t work), and the car I parked next to had blossom petals all over it. My cupful of snow melted in my office before I could pass it on, so I drank it. I’m cheating a bit and posting an edited version of that poem today, as I haven’t posted it before. 

Tanked II (haibun series)

If you’ve read my post Tanked, this picture of our new over-flow tank will be familiar. It’s 4m in diameter, weighs 400kg, and fell off the truck and tried to escape by rolling downhill into the dam when it was delivered. We stopped it, and rolled it back up to the house and tied it to a tree so it couldn’t get away.

tanked (haibun series)

It’s been a really wet year, and relying on tank water as we do it’s frustrating to see the tanks overflowing – all that water we can’t store just running down into the gullies! So having talked about it for months, and with the La Nina starting to fade away, we’ve finally bought another tank.

nodding greenhood

No flamboyant, pampered,
and over-bred
hot-housed princesses,
potted and fed,
no,

hereby dragonflies

For the dVerse prompt “dungeons and derivatives“:

Nothing comes from nothing,
there is no spontaneous generation.
Poems grow from words in waiting,
that swim beneath the surface
like nymphs in a pond.

darkness flows uphill

Night rises from the bottom of the valley,
sending darkness creeping,
quietly,
up the gullies,
its progress marked,
mournfully,
by the currawongs.

Darkness flows uphill,
like the opposite of the water
that,
along with the sky,
still holds the last of the day,
for us to take a final sip from.

 

mud

Sinking further into the mud
with every effort to escape,
she is trapped,
lying on her side,
muzzle barely above the water.
She lies for hours
before help arrives.

But how to drag
near a ton of horse
from the treacherous drying dam?