Along the road ...

 

along the road 

someone whistling – suddenly

my childhood

Under The Pinnacle (Snapshots)

Photo on postcard – rather more than a mere snapshot! – 

© Andi Islinger 1996, used with permission.

(The following 'word snapshots' were views 

from the other side and much further down.)

1. Looking up

Last time I looked up, The Pinnacle rose from mist; now it’s whited out.

Waterfalls of cloud curl over the mountain rim, a frothing torrent.

Pockets of mist stay, lingering around the foot of the jutting peak.

On the mountaintop a line of tree silhouettes, back-dropped by white sky.

2. Looking around

All green – grass, trees, hills; at the tip of a long stem, one red hibiscus.

Purple, red, yellow lanterns outside my window – the flowering trees.

A butterfly poised white on the end of a stem – the azalea sways.

In the farthest tree, suddenly a bright red flash – a rosella feeds.

The hibiscus dips: a magpie has glided in; it perches, head cocked.

Moss on stone; bare stone pointing finger-like to sky; bare sky; one small cloud.

***

Side view of The Pinnacle: the central, sharply pointed peak.

The 'word snapshots' were viewed from the bottom 

of what is here the left face.  (Photo mine.)

When, 30 years ago, my late husband Andrew Wade and I came to live in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, Australia, we rented a house for the first few years under a peak called The Pinnacle, not far from a village named Tyalgum. This weekend I'm one of the featured poetry readers at a one-day festival in Tyalgum, so I fished out some of the poems I wrote back then. These above were originally supposed to be haiku. I didn't know how to write haiku then – I thought it was just a matter of syllable count. So I have now discarded some, slightly rewritten others and turned them into American sentences (invented by Allen Ginsberg as a Western version of haiku). Each sentence is a separate snapshot in words.

Sharing this post (off-prompt) with Friday Writings #110 at Poets and Storytellers United.