Thank Goodness for Small Things

The day seemed enormous!
Hours stretched and sped,
alive with activity,
      with big ideas,
      massive doubts —
a huge amount of work!

And somewhere in it
a tiny bird
tapped gently at my office window;
the smallest part of my mind noticed;
the littlest child in me observed beauty
without a critical eye.

And I Breathed.

And knew how small I was
in the Great Scheme of Things.

It was comforting.


Bernadette Brady (Western Australia)

Vaccine

A small boy stacks blocks
on the surgery floor.
She gives his mother
a flu shot.
Its like this all day,
the pinpricks,
the swabbing,
the perfection of sterility.

Minutes before
it happened
her son was sitting
sorting pine cones
at her feet.

A June morning.
The clearing,
the mountain pool,
air astringent pine,
water’s surface
webbed in light,
his compact body floating,
as if in solution.


Jane Frank (Queensland)

The Gods Above

The gods live uphill, the better to look down
on humans, below (literal) and beneath (social),
who roil among mirrors of the immortal.
The hill, with crags and steeps, deters climbing;
the gods like a shortage of face to face;
they’ve never done multicultural.

Affront is their reaction to attempts
to reach their home. Hubris they call it.
Through lack of social skills, they have no talent
to interpret its meaning. Is it challenge,
attack, mistake or funny (peculiar) prayer?

The gods receive supplication – praise
is preferred – but chants and babble can fade
into the hillside and be ignored.
Sudden sobs and screams bring on alarm. The gods
don’t deal well with the unexpected.

Best loved is like the old days, smoke
from prayers on bark or parchment and burned.
They love the scent. But in the modern age,
with humans, fire is out of fashion.
The gods struggle to cope with change.


E A M Harris (UK)

Three Cats and a Dog

And then she asked,
‘What breed?’

And I’m like,
‘She can see the same future,
and it’s beautiful.
The bronzed sun rising
in the summertime,
with her hand in mine
as I write my lines.’

And then time dilates
and I’m lost in the moment forever,
and then time bounces back
like it always does,
and anyway,
she’s supposed to be working.

Truth is,
I don’t really care what breed,
whichever breed would make her happy,
'cause I’m happy when she’s happy.

Besides,
one dog is never
enough,
especially when you’ve got
three cats.


Dane Cobain (UK)

Politics

C S Hughes

Intrusion

They came
With the ocean, carried on the waves,
They came
With loud voices that cracked through the bush,
They came
With guns and nothing was safe,
They came
With strange animals and let them roam,
They came
With axes and hacked and chopped,
They came
With greed and nothing was sacred,
They came
Without asking and offered no apology,
They came
With no white flag and expected surrender,
They came


Rachel McEleney (Western Australia)

Mandatharra

on the road to the vanishing point
we layered our story
over the Inggarda stories

ice age, crinoids, early
Permian, ancient sea bed,
quartzblow, sandstone
plateau, elevated,
compressed, faulted,
uplifted

on the road of smashed bones
corpses unburied
spat to the side
the road of sliced rubber
we picked up Daniel
his tyre the road’s latest meal
out there on the horizon
heat turns distance to water
and waves
we asked what do you call the blue smudge
map-named for a pastoralist’s wife

in his grandmother’s country
he can’t say
he can’t say
he can’t say the name

on the road to the vanishing point
the road of broken bones and sliced rubber
our tongues strangle names
he can.


Coral Carter (Western Australia)

weeds

supplicant green
tip to eager root/gloved hand

complete

like a slammed door/dead phone/totalled car

weeds spread quietly

while you sleep/stare at weave
in an office partition/wipe dust from a desk phone

on your way by goldfish sunrise
green under bike wheel

weeds stretch wide loop tight
knit into more

in the slide of a month
so many/so many

they begin to look
like they have design
logic
knowing


Alice Allan (Victoria)