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.
