ugh!

I have final exams!

One tomorrow and another next week.
I'm so anxious I can hardly stay in the same room with myself, let alone sit down and study my work.

Pray for me. I need all the help I can get!

Flower Study (1932)

Colin McCahon

Bones and Light


I don't understand
how you'd cut the land -
gold
deep into gold -
like the rush in Otago.

MacKenzie country bones
yielding such bright yellow -
as if sun could rise
from their gutted marrow.

Cut with spade or pick,
by men who thought that sun
could be held and melded
by hand

the way that gold
could drip to a canvas
from the artist's palette
like a cut from a knife

revealing a swathe of light.

An Inconvenient Truth

I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, the movie Al Gore made about global warming, today.
This is a movie everyone should see. If you haven't seen it already, go and see it as soon as you can.
I heard some things I already knew, but I learned heaps I didn't know.
If I was American I would vote this guy in as president.

Putting Things in Context

This man was a hero
in the only way a man can be,
in that he was the best
he could be -
did the best he could do -

amidst a litany of loss
in the soul chambers of hearts.

In the crying spaces
there is lightning and flesh -

square your shoulders to the sky woman
as she twirls coloured strata of clouds,
draws lightning from your skin.

We travel these night rooms,
walk the shiny edges.
Your hands, as familiar as my own,
are lost to me now.

There's no way back
down that cinder road,
where the wind lifted
and left us,
straining at the bounty of life,
to break in, to count.

Like xylaria hypoxylon
around aspen-soft poplars,
tiny brown spring,
lepista nuda, from our feet.

Our footprints, like shakyamuni's,
the only testimony of our passage here,
at the mercy of tides.

Ecology Child

Born at the turn of the century
under a new moon,

the waters of her birth are muddy;
she carries pocketfuls of sky
where vultures circle.

She believes in magic,
smoothed from her fingers
into sand, stone, and soil,

but men have woven counterspells
for decades. Henry Ford's spores
lead the soil, rivers bleed
through walls of turbines.

The firmament has shed her soft veil
before the red eye of Orc, and he stirs
ancient gods of hurricane and flood.

Bodies swell through broken
beds of the ocean as the last oil
is leeched from the marrow of the earth.

This little girl sews with a fishbone needle
and a silver thread of light
along the fissure of dawn,
a lacework of memory
of how the globe used to be,
a refuge for bio-diversity.

As she sews she sings a nursery rhyme of A B C ...
remember, remember -

all that remains is this seedlike ember.

Last Voyage of the Relavista

Wavy lines pass the window,
tubes of light squeezed up between them.
Baby sleeps craddled in the church
of his brother's arms.

We are fifteen years out
from the wreck of the Meridesterous.
Fresh peaches rippen in the orchards
and salmon run in the hatcheries.

We are the favoured/savoured/ of the Gong San,
our voyage a pilgimmage to an arid star.
Arraminta is our shield maiden,
the Milky Way glimmers
before the prow of our ship.

Where once we had homes, now
we live in the belly of the Relavista,
our land of Cannan. We shall not return.

Our children are born in the null of space.
We fall through sunsets of time,
the last, the lost,
bereft of homelands.

All we have known, detrius behind us.
We slide into our future like a slipper,
soft, on the steps of the Imperial Suyn -
They do not know we come.

The Blonde in Me

lip freak,
shirtless and hands on knees.

if I roll up my eyes
and purse my brunette charms

will you scoop a kiss or two
into my pinny?