Happy New Year!

Sociabilities May Be Alarming

However, it was a jolly Christmas and I hope everyone else had a good Christmas or at least an OK one.

This year I emailed several Christmas cards. 

For local friends I got some bright cards with a tree very cheap from the Indian Everything Shop in Surrey Hills. I was on the lookout for things to add to the collections of angels, gods, goddesses, heros and feng shui animals. (My place isn't as crowded as the collections suggest because it's a large place with ledges and picture rails.)

A good statue of a well known hero caught my eye. It was out of my budget, but having read about such flights of humanic vision in many ways since childhood, I decided to peek inside the neat little card that was titled Greek Hero ($89). Somehow someone must have got a little mixed up. It was a small and excellently crafted statue of Moses, MichaelAngelo's Moses.

My lost sister would have loved it. She collected statues.

These cards (10 for $2.85) only said Merry Christmas inside them so when I got ready to give them out, I copied one of my poems for the text. It is a poem I wrote ages ago when I lived in the box over the road, and things got mixed up in storage and I ripped the poem out of the notebook to read to someone, (one doesn't have much forethought in moving times, in illness times) and the rest of it is still hopefully the box it was in when I borrowed those pages back then whichever box that was:

And let my own words now sing song,

make music roll forth all day long.

May my words embrace the soul,

do this to make an old world whole.

May singing bless, may good words ring,

may poetry cause our hearts to sing,

be in our bones and in our blood,

make goodness come in righteous flood.

The poem came from a dream.

Slowly I thread through the phases of those older times when my possessions became debris. I need filing folders. There may be some somewhere but I can't find them. Easier to work with folders on the computer, easier to find things here, even though I can get my titles mixed up if I'm not careful. 

Recently I've noticed that when I emerge from the screen or page or move around the weeds, that there have been several days of such divine warm sparkle after a bracing Southerly Buster that I can't imagine being unable to dip my body in water or feast my eyes on the loveliness of the sea. 

(Mind you the storms frequently leap in response to a stinking weary fuming hot day when all you want to do is go to the pub).

There have also been many lovely balmy days, not so many returns to iciness as there was a few weeks ago. On a warm fresh day I recall the days of childhood and young adultry when we were always tuned to the beach.

When himself and myself lived at Bondi, we were just up the cliff from the ocean which was then a part of our every moment. I began a series of poems because there was inspiration afoot.

Poetry is amends for the future. On a crystalline day following a stormy night, I found myself yearning for a taste of the ocean on a perfect ocean day, so I hunted for the Bondi poem which illustrated the storms which stomp regularly around Sydney's summer and Christmas Season suburb by suburb and sometimes in one place out of the blue.

Although I found many poems from the Bondi Seasons Suite had been transcribed onto the computer from a variety of note books and an edit of some of the collection last year when I was going for competitions, the precise long ago Summer Storm which was ringing its words at me wasn't there.

To breathe the breath of the ocean after a storm is a good thing.

Change.

A veil of rain

thrown over the sea

from this morning’s storms

is lifted by the sun

as the surface of the ocean

gleams in light.

The Ocean From Mark’s Park.

The green waves flow,

the horizon a moist mist blue.

The flats are struggling down the cliff, climbing over

to catch the view, the glimpse of blue.

Torn by the weather,

The sea opens its heart

And mist rises

Above the surface of the water.