Merry Christmas!
December 22, 2014
Just like the title says, to all readers.
If you press this link, you will find a radical poem by Emily Brontë about her relationship with God, along with some rather bashful commentary at the Tuesday Poem hub. (I wrote the commentary, and Emily Brontë overawes me a little. I felt as if I was putting one of those idiotic jokes that you find in Christmas crackers below something ineluctably profound.)
Now, like the entire population of Australia (give or take a few hundred thousand more sensible souls) I am off to drink and eat far too much. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, and neither do I post lists of what I achieved this year, in the manner of the fearsomely scary and boastful letters that some Americans send each other. (‘Clara is graduating from NASA as an astronaut with a sub-major in Klingon, and Peter just bought Harvard to match last year’s Yale.’)
There really is no ‘end of the year’. Time is not a commodity that we control, or which gives any attention to our calendars. But that is no reason not to have fun, and to reflect a little.
I intend to do some reflection in rock pools, and to splash in the surf.
God bless us, every one!
Tuesday poem: Bathers from Poland
October 7, 2013
Bathers from Poland
They are on their way;
my new bathers, adorned
with palm trees so neon
they glowed on Bikini
when the Americans
taught sand to speak atomic.
Bathers from Poland
to Australia;
winging their way
through choked skies,
changing the air
and thickening it
with chemical spread.
One piece retro.
Black, and a blue
never seen on any beach
where water meets grin
of yellow sand.
Modesty panel!
You will shade
a shyer smile of glee.
P.S. Cottier
This is not Canberra.
Having returned from a very sybaritic week at the beach (not the beach above, but a ‘proper Aussie beach’) I thought I would post this poem about some bathers I really did buy from Poland. Which is like selling coals to Newcastle, in reverse. I think.
Are they beachifying themselves in New Zealand, the United States, or Paris? I know not! I will press this albatross feather to find out, and I suggest you do the same:
PS Cottier 