Your free range children ... Have they no mercy? Heckling cicadas of all things 😂
"choosing instead to take this morning
with the shutter of my eye and print it in memory"
Well ... there it is ... Choosing to let the experience stand on its own rather than pinning it to a page in a butterfly collection.
This is just a masterful piece of work David, if you will allow me to offer a heartfelt compliment one grizzled geezer to another.
The sentences take me to a place that I love to occupy these days.
You probably get this all the time but, wasn't Alice Springs the setting for the first Dundee movie?
I have often looked at it on a map, in the middle of your little atoll, knowing just enough about the place to suppose that I shouldn't try to walk there. Have you returned recently?
Hey Jed! Thankyou! Ah well the town scene in Crocodile Dundee was a fictional place called "Walkabout Creek." The outback action all happens in Kakadu National Park - a vast area of tropical savannah, rocky escarpments and flood plain, East of Darwin on the coast of the Northern Territory. Alice is all desert - definitely no crocs :). It's close to the geographic centre of the continent. I haven't been back for a while, but plan to do so soonish. It makes a great road trip.....
Ah, beautiful! The recurring image if the empty shell, and the morning filled with smells and light and meaning. In a way this poem reminded me of the starfish story 😊
Thankyou, dear Ronnie. Children help us to see the world the way we used to see it ourselves. It's something I try to keep alive in my perception....
Ummm... the starfish story... I was going to ask you "what starfish story?" - because it was not familiar to me - but I asked the Genie of the Google instead, and it came up straight away.
So yep - that's me; throwing starfish back, one by one. Or saving cicadas. Or (endlessly) relocating spiders from inside our house to outside. Some of them are big beasts too - and I'm sure it's the same spiders that just keep coming back. I'm tempted to add a dot of bright paint to each one, just to see if I'm right!
Dear Martin. Those are very kind words, and deeply appreciated. All the more so because you are man of Cork, with legend, poetry and song flowing in your veins!
*What does it mean, to make a place home?
How do you learn to love a place you have never lived before?*
… Ahhh my friend you’ve always known intuitively….
I saw it as I watched you walk up my driveway; backpack on your shoulder …
Love this:
choosing instead to take this morning
with the shutter of my eye and print it in memory;
my head a darkroom, my life a film
dipped in developer, fixative, rinsed
then pegged up to dry - recorded imperfectly.
Thankyou Lori. Memory is such a strange thing.....
I experienced a form of teleportation to Alice Springs.
Cicadas, the singers, the poets, always a feast for the practically minded ants .
Well, yes. I like ants too, Nikos, but.... us Poets have to stick together, no?
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Nice read and pics as well!
Thankyou! I'm mixing old works from my past and new my present, but our present is always partly a product of our past...
Your free range children ... Have they no mercy? Heckling cicadas of all things 😂
"choosing instead to take this morning
with the shutter of my eye and print it in memory"
Well ... there it is ... Choosing to let the experience stand on its own rather than pinning it to a page in a butterfly collection.
This is just a masterful piece of work David, if you will allow me to offer a heartfelt compliment one grizzled geezer to another.
The sentences take me to a place that I love to occupy these days.
You probably get this all the time but, wasn't Alice Springs the setting for the first Dundee movie?
I have often looked at it on a map, in the middle of your little atoll, knowing just enough about the place to suppose that I shouldn't try to walk there. Have you returned recently?
Hey Jed! Thankyou! Ah well the town scene in Crocodile Dundee was a fictional place called "Walkabout Creek." The outback action all happens in Kakadu National Park - a vast area of tropical savannah, rocky escarpments and flood plain, East of Darwin on the coast of the Northern Territory. Alice is all desert - definitely no crocs :). It's close to the geographic centre of the continent. I haven't been back for a while, but plan to do so soonish. It makes a great road trip.....
Ah, beautiful! The recurring image if the empty shell, and the morning filled with smells and light and meaning. In a way this poem reminded me of the starfish story 😊
Thankyou, dear Ronnie. Children help us to see the world the way we used to see it ourselves. It's something I try to keep alive in my perception....
Ummm... the starfish story... I was going to ask you "what starfish story?" - because it was not familiar to me - but I asked the Genie of the Google instead, and it came up straight away.
So yep - that's me; throwing starfish back, one by one. Or saving cicadas. Or (endlessly) relocating spiders from inside our house to outside. Some of them are big beasts too - and I'm sure it's the same spiders that just keep coming back. I'm tempted to add a dot of bright paint to each one, just to see if I'm right!
I'll be naming them next.....
Best Wishes - Dave :)
Dot them, name them, tame them, then write them into a story… 🕷️🕸️😀
Thank you for sharing all of this David. You made it so real and relatable, it almost goes beyond poetry. But it's so good.
Dear Martin. Those are very kind words, and deeply appreciated. All the more so because you are man of Cork, with legend, poetry and song flowing in your veins!
Very Best Wishes - Dave :)
Opening the cottage again
For another spring
The Lievre River
Roaring with logs
And deadheads
The mouse
Frightened
Scrambled out of sight
in the kitchen
I could just see
A patch of grey
And fired at it
With my 357 magnum
Gas pistol
My dad who
Had seen men
Die in combat
Shuddered at the bloody mess
Surprising me
To a mouse
Yes. Sadly - me too. The real cicadas at least drown out the imaginary ones....