Don’t be in a hurry, the buds tell me.
Open when you’re ready.
What does it matter if others blossom
before you?
Remember the gulls
how they fly in loose formation over the sea
at sunset,
how there’d always be some bringing up the rear,
the stragglers.
It’s not a race as our Prime Minister said.
They get there in their own sweet time.
Like my teachers said of me, you may be slow, John,
but you get there in the end,
It’s okay to be a straggler.
People who live here, he said, live with their backs to the sea.
And I said, how could anyone turn their backs to the sea?
And I thought of mum, before she was hauled away, saying,
I want to go back to the sea again,
how she sounded like Miranda the mermaid who had strayed
from her home
but when she got her wish, when we got her into a retirement home
on the esplanade, she grew jaded.
What’s wrong, mum? we asked.
I want to go home, she said. I want to go back where I lived with dad.
But you’ve got a ringside seat, mum, to the Southern Ocean. A view to die for.
It’s not the same, she said, not when you see the same thing day after day.
But we sat with her, watching the red sun sit on the lip of the horizon like a wafer,
the seabirds flying home, and a kind of calm settled on her.
Now it is spent and lying limp
and placid at my feet —
a contentment of inky blue
but the other day if you
could have seen it bucking
with energy , flailing its
wild hair and arching its back
[ sea mountains surfers abseiled
down ] you would not have been
surprised to see it thrust
its loins again and again against
the soft white dunes nor after
to see the body of the foreshore
bruised and torn nor its rump
so foam wracked .
pic by Lachlan-Ross on Pexels
On the shortest day
I take the longest run
between one jetty and the next
and back again
rest myself against the rump
of a dune
listen to the sea shanties of the waves
while a mermaid appears, rises above the waves
swinging her wild, wild hair
in the sun-drenched breeze
until spotting me she coyly slips
beneath the water.
The jetty wades a little deeper into the sea
to catch a glimpse.
On the shortest day I tell
the tallest tales.
I have a mote in my left eye
not the metaphoric one that Jesus
spoke of
but an actual one of grit.
I have amoat in my head too
which is metaphoric.
It cuts me off from needy people
which is kinda funny
coz I’m needy too.
Some people are overly guarded.
Too many moats to cross.
Australia has a moat,
a helluva big one
called the Pacific Ocean
on one side
& the Indian on the other
the one that boat people crossed
to get to Australia.
One family from Vietnam
lived across the road from us
for years.
I wrote about the man, the grandfather
in my first book.
[I’ll post it tomorrow]
A moat as big as the ocean
is hazardous.
Not everyone made it back then.
The Earth is surrounded
by a moat too
the vast star-studded ocean
of space.
I could go on but this poem
is starting to drift.
so I’m going to put a moat around it
and close it off.
* photo by juvnsky-enton-maksimor on Unsplash
Whales!
I heard there were whales lunging out of the water
At Henley South,
“sleek and smooth as peach slices”,
One eye witness said.
I finished what I was doing and went down
For a look.
But the sea was flat and empty.
There were only a pair of cyclists on the other side
Doing up their clips
And a pelican amongst the gulls gazing wistfully to a spot
Where something might have been.
No sun was out. The sky was whale-grey.
I had missed the moment.
I was tearing along the coastal route
The little white horses racing into shore
When this song came over the radio
And galloped into my heart.
I pulled over onto the shoulder.
I was transported.
I closed my eyes and let the music
Take me.
8.30 seconds later I was released.
It was good to hear Derek and The Dominoes again.
It was good to hear ‘Layla’
What songs stop you in your tracks, transport you to other places? What songs do you pull over for?
The challenge was to write a book review in haiku form. Here is my first attempt. Do you want to try one? It will be interesting to see what people come up with.
‘The True Color of the Sea’
didn’t flow for me
its prose flat and monochrome
as a pancake sea
the haiku lunges
out of the dark ocean of text
its flanks be-jeweled
by sun, the way
a whale lunges out of the water
in Oban Bay
John Malone 