New-old haiku

I found this one in my files, written nearly two years ago on 24th February 2016 and not posted to a blog. (I think I was saving it to enter a competition which I then forgot about.)

ah! my skin cools –

reflections of light
in deep water

My Name is Rosemary

"Never let anyone

shorten your name,"

said the Sage.

"You need Mary

for your strength."

And since then

I never have –

though, before that,

I liked Rose …

being a rose.

Mary. I ponder –

The Great Mother?

Or the sea?

(Rosemary means Rose

of the Sea.)

Mary the Mother

endured all things,

and was brave;

while the sea

is ancient, wild.

My namesake plant,

that resilient shrub,

has a fragrance

not sweet, but

faintly salt-tinged.

"Don’t," I say,

"call me Rose.

Friends call me

Rosemary." I smile,

and they comply.

Also shared at The Poetry of Three: three words per line on facebook.

In Fading Light

Cool evening, after
day's heavy heat.

I linger on
my top step,
for the breeze.

A faint rumble
might be thunder

or a car....


Linking to The Poetry of Three: three words per line on facebook

The Smell of Home

The smell of home is a gum-leaf, picked off the tree as I walk beneath, crushed between my fingers and held to my nose, deeply inhaled … then discarded. Plenty more where that came from!

Graphic from Rooweb Clipart / CC BY 4.0

Summer Driving in Northern Rivers

There is nowhere to stop.

This photo is just for me, 

in the camera of my mind. 

Above the mountain range, 

banks of thick, frothy clouds

echo the mountain shapes. 

I round a bend. On the hill, 

a stand of Norfolk Pine 

rises black against the sky.

(Where are you? Where are you? 

I want you here beside me, to see –

though you wander free ... 

and in tunnels of my mind.)

At Your Engagement Party

To Adam

I kept taking photos of

your gate-crasher, because

she couldn't resist the music, 

drawn in through open door 

of the party restaurant

to where the guitarist sat, 

in a corner so he wouldn’t be crowded. 

It was all those 

liquid Spanish tunes. How 

could she have refrained, how ever,  

from dancing?

And she was so bright, 

in her shiny, slinky, green-and-yellow dress,

and she clicked her heels Flamenco-style,

and clapped her hands over her head.

And she kept apologising, softly, shyly,

in her foreign accent, but 

she didn’t stop dancing, didn’t stop twirling,

didn’t stop brightening further –

as if under a spotlight …

creating her own spotlight –

the already-festive night.

(She gave permission for her photo to be used online. 

We never learned her name.)

Grand-daughter Requests

Grand-daughter requests help

with her maths homework.

I try. I can understand

the graphs, and confirm

her answers are perfect.

But ‘experimental probability’

is a foreign language for me.

I know what each word means,

but not together, and not in maths.

She is kind when I tell her,

‘This is far beyond me’; requests
I not worry or blame myself.