you know you do know of course you do it is like a bicycle tyre if punctuated it will be airless down to the hard rim of the matter of all things difficult but if it is unpunctuated well i would call it air on a rim for a to b though nothing too difficult not the bare bones of reality summery visionary floating along
At dVerse Sanaa is hosting Prosery (144 words) with an invitation to write prose including the line “The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, that where I pushed my way the giant hush was changed to soft explosion.” from the poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills.” by Yvor Winters
dVerse Poets – Prosery – A View From The Hills
Photo: Forest trail in the Beelu National Park, Mundaring.
Never Disappointed
I often wonder what the first Europeans felt when they encountered the Darling Scarp in late spring or kambarang when the heat returns. Would it equate with my experiences of kangaroo grasses, wattles, eucalypts, banksias, melaleucas , callistemons, grevilleas and more in a burst of vibrant colour? The dry earth, grasses, leaves, powdering with every footfall, the smell of eucalyptus on the wafting air. The buzzing of beetles and cicada songs. The lingering smells of kangaroos and emus overlaid by the sounds of magpies, honeyeaters, red-capped parrots. Sometimes over a whole day, but often all at once, an assault on the senses. As Yvor Winters once wrote of another place – The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, that where I pushed my way the giant hush was changed to soft explosion. Now, after many years hiking, I am never disappointed by the soft explosion.
Attempts are still being made to kettle our resistance soon they will seek to stop us breathing but for now they are pummelling our mouths lest we speak truth to power, they are punishing youth restricting the internet, they arrest the heart of us preventing protest at every turn, certain words terrify the fascists words like love, empathy, compassion, far more powerful than a gun they hate equality and freedom they despise community, soon breathing will be illegal but with our last breath anything might happen.
Historically the sewing of one’s lips is a response to institutional silencing and abuse, other contexts include gender silencing, poverty, being denied agency …. In some cases it is done to people as violent threat and punishment.
A Stitch In Time
The needle marks are in your lips but the thread is deeper than that wrapping itself around the vagus, though not yet drawing tight so that your parasympathetic self still fluidly functions, though one day soon enough it will and you will then be silent, unless of course you simply unpick it all in that laborious fiddly uncradling of the maudlin status quo, which takes a lifetime but which is infinitely the better way if we desire by experience to be freely spoken.
We can flick a switch on or off, light can be manufactured we've been doing that for millennia but darkness well we can’t manufacture that the stars forbid it, we can only dispel it even contrive it, but there is no turning it on, not yet.
Important as it is it wasn’t the complexity of love alone that won the day or your beauty which caused nations of minds to clamour for your attention and of course mine, nor was it your kindness which is legendary beyond even my reckoning empathy your bright star, it is in fact something almost prosaic, it was the search for what animates us underpins the universe is meaning making - what draws us bonds us in a common endeavour of seeking the mystery.
For Tanka Tuesday Poetry Challenge No. 67, Yellow Things, Colleen has invited us to write syllabic poetry using things that are yellow! Try to use at least two yellow things in your poem. Try NOT to use the word yellow. Instead, use the yellow thing as your metaphor to tell us the colour.
parallax 