Sit down to write
Nothing comes out but a hiss
Can’t think of anything
Thinking of everything
All at once.
Sentence fragments
The smell of lemons
A stubbed toe
What should I make for dinner?
The grass needs mowing
Pizza
Warm sun on bare feet
Itchy back
My desk is a mess
The cat wants in
The cat wants out
Words on paper
Spell check.
Freckles
Clean the house
Wet paint
Elephants
Meteor showers
Drifts of flowers
Girls and boys
White noise.
Day and night balanced
Poised to tip the world into
Darkness or sunlight.
I picked up my phone today, and it automatically opened the camera, which I had used last. This is the picture it framed—a corner of my desk—and it struck me as a curious slice of my life and personality. In the picture are:
There you have it. The messy corner of my brain, where poems vie with the day’s to-do list, and numbers and words mix, and good intentions meet reality, and maybe
today’s to-do list
becomes
tomorrow’s poetry.
Stop.
Soak up the still silence.
Except that it is neither still
Nor silent.
Wind tumbles
The leaves of the trees.
Overhead in the branches, sounds
The pebble-in-a-still-pool languor
Of the bellbird,
The electric zit-zit
Of the rifleman.
Nearby, a small stream
Hisses over the rocks.
And from farther away
Comes the deep rumble
Of the river
Shaking the stone
As it crashes
Headlong
Down the mountain.
A dozen things I should be doing
But I am at the piano instead.
Rodgers and Hammerstein,
Gary Portnoy,
Roger Post,
Scott Joplin,
Johann Straus…
Paths my fingers have travelled before,
New ones they do not know.
I sing along
Or not.
A key sticks.
It doesn’t matter.
In the notes,
In the silences
In rest and beat
Between bass and treble clefs
I find the centre once again.
Dissonance
Resolved
The last note
Carries me on.
I couldn’t resist a story in verse this week…
A gardener’s life is full of shit
And compost is the best of it.
Now hear a tale of a gardener who
Rose to fame on a pile of poo.
T’was springtime when, as all do know
Young green things are apt to grow.
And Sally, your young gardener fair
Prepared the soil with skill and care.
She turned it with her spading fork.
And pulled the weeds, such heavy work.
Then went she to the compost pile.
Which had been rotting for a while.
Cow pies, weeds and chicken poo,
Mouldy hay she’d added, too.
It made a rick and crumbly mix.
The deficiencies of her soil to fix.
Into the soil her compost went.
She mixed, raked it, then she bent
And lovingly she planted seed
‘Atlantic Giant’, yes indeed.
For this year, she would beat them all
Win biggest pumpkin in the fall.
All summer she did weed and water
As though the pumpkin were her daughter.
The pumpkin grew, and grew, and grew.
Drawing nutrients from the poo.
And Sally grinned as the contest neared.
She thought of past competitors who jeered.
But this year, she would have last laugh.
She had the biggest pumpkin by half.
Fifteen hundred pounds it weighed.
A large blue ribbon on it laid.
Sally was famous, her gardening lauded.
And all the spectators loudly applauded.
And when she was asked, just what did she do,
She calmly replied, “I just fed it some poo!”
Rock and limpet,
Sea and shell,
Oh, what stories
You might tell!
Of mako shark and
Manatee,
Shipwrecked sailors
Lost at sea.
Love songs of
The humpbacked whale,
Farewells as a ship
Sets sail.
Jellyfish that sting
With grace,
Corals waving
Fronds of lace.
Sea slug, starfish,
Kelp and ray,
Eel and flounder
In the bay.
Squid and seahorse
Swimming by–
All the things
That you and I
Will never see.
Unless, one day
By unknown magic
Or perhaps by
Accident tragic.
We find ourselves
Beneath the water,
Swimming free
Like Neptune’s daughter.
Oh, little seed
Barely a speck.
Germ and cotyledon armoured
In seed coat.
You hold such potential–
A pea, a bean, a sprawling melon
Waits inside your humble shell.
Such modest desires you possess–
Soil, sun, water, warmth.
It is my pleasure to provide for you
Knowing you, someday, will provide for me–
Succulent tomatoes, crisp lettuce, spicy radishes.
I can taste your future.
Grow, little seed.
You are my sun, my life, my lunch.
You are spring itself.
What is this in my chair?
Cat—hair
Who spreads tail across the couch?
Cat—slouch
You leap upon the windowsill
Cat—still
You howl at night atop a wall
Cat—call
You catch a mouse and eat it whole
Cat—role
You please yourself and that is that
Cat—fat
In honour of National Poetry Day this Friday, the remainder of my posts this week will be in verse.
Fog billows in wet.
Frosting hair, spider webs, grass
With silver gilding.
_______
Magpie warbles loud
In early morning darkness,
Waking up the sun.
_______
Bees hum in purple
Lavender blooms, blue pollen
Dusting hairy backs.
_______
Seedlings defy frost,
Growing tall in warm sunshine,
Sheltered under glass.
_______
Sparrows descend to
Old sheds, bringing straw, grass, noise
Leaving poo, feathers.
_______
Ploughs plough, seagulls wheel
Overhead seeking
The freshly turned worm.
Robinne Weiss 