my head has been full of words

but no poetry

no rhythm or rhyme of lilt

It is like the birds stopped singing

And the way the flowers from my birthday

die brightly

Yet they are still dead

writing can be useful

it can be sparse

business like

efficient

It can explain

Enable

emailingggggg

and in all of this writing

I may find satisfaction

but it is the poetry

that talks to me of the colour of sky

or dry grass

the smell of spring

when it isn’t quite arrived on the calendar

yet the wattles bow beneath heavy yellow blooms

and the bees are loud

and the car window suddenly needs to be relaxed

so I can smell the evening breeze

It whips my hair

and for a moment I am eighteen again

in love with my freedom

poetry is feeling

but writing

sometimes just feels like a task

I’m dealing with

right now.

*Lately, it has been all business—an endless stretch of writing and research. And in the quiet hours, I’ve felt my poetry wither, curling like a dry leaf at the edge of my mind. Even now, in setting down these words, a trace of that old current stirs—because poetry is noticing. It is nature herself within me, noticing the little girl smiling up at her mother in pure adoration, and the ache of knowing how that love will twist and reform a thousand times before she reaches thirty. It is hearing the birds, feeling the texture of flour as I cook, being present.

Yesterday I sat down to honour what has become my Saturday ritual: shaping the fragments I had scribbled earlier in the week into a Substack journal entry, which published this morning (Sunday). From there I wandered over to my website and wrote again. A Saturday given to writing—not labour to me, but a small bridge laid back toward poetry.

And so here we are. Not the finest verse in the world, perhaps, but a marker dropped in this moment of my life. That, after all, is why I began this blog: to leave traces, however small, of where I’ve been. I’ll spend the next few days circling back to my reading, but for now I’ll leave the comments closed—because when I fall behind on your words, I feel it like a guilt, and I need first to catch up.

Header photo: Gidgee tree south west QLD taken on a recent trip.