Lost Years
In my past, I saw life through a haze,
Or perhaps it was through a dust-storm!
I found myself trapped in the grip of love,
“Whatever love is” - as Prince Charles
famously quipped!
I thought I couldn’t exist without you,
I thought I had no future without you.
Countless days I agonized, waiting for your call,
And countless nights I sat outside staring at the stars,
Re-arranging them to spell out your name!
How foolish I was - and how lost, all those years of so long ago.
If I could “wish upon a star” now,
I would wish I could have valued myself
And written my own name in the night sky.
© June Maureen Hitchcock
Diet Of Worms
When I was small, I was annoyed,
For I was forbidden, by adults,
To caress forlorn cats and dogs,
For they didn’t want me to feast
on a diet of worms.
When I was older and my dormant brain
had been activated by reading the history of the famous,
I became aware of my cruel
childhood for I had been deprived of animal
warmth because of “ignoramus” adults.
For if worms were so feared, so bad,
why did the pious, Martin Luther
have a Diet of Worms?
©Judy Brumby-Lake
Hungry Voices Are Singing
Poverty comes easy as does the pangs of hunger pains,
Crops are a distant memory, gone with the life-giving rains.
The shadow of drought casts a curse upon this land,
The fate of future generations is held in the Devil’s hand.
The child born into hunger seeks comfort and a feed,
Its own siblings, its rivals, in a fight for a basic need.
I can never seem to rid myself, no matter how hard I try,
Of the sight of a starving child; the sound of its anguished cry.
A hungry voice is singing, a lament for you to hear;
There is no saving music as death grows ever near.
A nation that’s in famine, unable to feed their young,
Asks the world for life in the words of the dying sung.
A world of empty promises and empty pockets too,
To allow such pitiful suffering, this, sadly is nothing new,
Let’s share our resources, let there be enough to go around,
Let’s teach the world to feed itself. Compassion soon is found.
© William (Bill) Law
Ironically She Said -
So I sat and I thought,
On morals and such,
And came to the conclusion
We think too much.
“Oh! How I wonder!”
And, “don’t you suppose?”
“What if?”
WHAT IF?
Nobody knows!
Yes, it’s all fine in the stories;
It’s all fine to muse
But guard your reality,
Without which, who knows?
© Dripping Ink (Lauren Hay)
Lauren Hay
She made up her mind that she was old,
and that was that.
She had been told that her great-grandmother, at 40,
exhausted by years of childbearing,
had put on a bonnet and shawl,
and thereafter wore black,
her only reading, the family Bible.
Her grandmother, whom she remembered as an ancient lady,
always seemed concerned only to keep her house immaculate,
busy with superintending the housekeeper and the scullery-maid.
Her own mother, with whom she had little affinity,
gave up all physical exercise and intellectual pursuits when she was 60.
But she herself, still with good health and mental ability,
and with access to a world of literature and music,
decided she was too old to learn anything new,
or to explore the possibilities
of fresh friendships and enterprises.
She denied memories of the fragrance
of a newly-wakened baby,
or the feel of a toddler’s trusting hand in hers.
She found she had absolutely nothing in common with young people,
never inviting them to say what they thought
about the world that her generation had despoiled,
let alone their own hopes and aspirations.
When she opened the local paper,
her only interest was to find out who had died.
She even cut out the occasional obituary,
to paste into her scrap-book,
alongside those of long-dead friends and acquaintances.
She forgot to rejoice
as the low early winter sun lit up the valley,
or the waning moon transformed to
iridescence
the neap-tide sea.
Above all, ever aware that her own life might end at any time,
and burdened by anxieties and trivia,
she found herself unable to regard each dawn as a precious God-given new day.
© Mary Kille
Boy Lost...
The village was called Hochkirk, when back in eighteen ninety-five,
on farm land strewn with logs and swamps, all places dangers thrive,
a lad not yet four tender years played with his father’s dog
then followed as it wandered off hunting ’roos amongst the bogs.
He wasn’t missed ’til half past four when a search was done in vain,
so neighbours joined to seek the child but by nine had shown no gain.
When the dog returned much later still but without the child in tow
both parents must have felt the fear that only loving
parents know.
With darkness came the chill of night with scant moonlight no relief
for a child out there lost and alone, this could only end in grief.
Two searchers had gone far afield and too weary to return
had built themselves a warming fire with logs they’d piled to burn.
As they huddled near their fire’s warmth, their watch
showing 2 am.
then one thought he’d heard a child’s cry... they listened... there...again!
As one took the tidings back to town the boy was safe in the other’s care
wrapped snugly in his work coat, and warmed by the camp fire there.
One mile and a half he’d wandered through the cold and dark of night
while no-one knows what perils were spared that lost and frightened mite.
Since other similar tales are told, some may think this just another
but that lad was Alfred Noske, the father of my children’s mother.
© Pete Stratford
Michael Garrad
Talk about one flew over the cuckoo’s nest – I mean the stork flew over the cuckoo’s nest. More to the point, the stork flew over a multitude of vegetable gardens.
All these lovely young women were strolling about, minding their own business, admiring lettuce and cucumber, tomato and potato, and cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower, carrots and peas, zucchini, marrow, parsnip, turnip, swede, onion - such a fruitful and beautiful and vibrant harvest to behold.
And that, of course, is how it happened – somewhere near the fenceline where the silverbeet was flourishing.
The stork thought it would take a closer look and so it did, then flew off after the damage was done.
The stork, the vegetables and those lovely young ladies – almost all at the same time in gardens across the country.
Suddenly, the young and the fertile found themselves heavy of tummy. Bloated, in fact! Was it just good eating from such a myriad choice of God’s good green that caused internal gas to expand (too much of a good thing can be just too much) or an affliction which nature would fix in a day or two?
No – more like some months, nine months in fact, give or take a week or so. What a long time to be round of belly. So I asked the gardener hoeing his plot, “How come?” He said, “Time of the year. Seeds have been sown and the crop is healthy.”
I had a querying furrow on my brow. He said, “They’re having babies!” “Baby corn?” I asked.
“No, no,” he replied, “babies!”
“Now I understand,” I said. “Too many vegetables can be bad for you!”
“Or good for you,” the gardener said.
In The New Crowd
They’re all gone,
The people,
Only memories lurk,
I lived then,
And I live now,
They have succumbed to death,
To old age,
To obscurity,
I see them now,
I hear them now,
I am the survivor,
All done, all over,
Who were they?
I remember,
Most don’t now,
New generations have
steamrolled recollections,
Was it real, trick of mind?
No, they were there,
They are there!
All of them, in human shape.
I shall catch the last train
all the way back,
All the way down,
They’ll be in the new crowd
at Shepherds Bush and beyond.
© Michael Garrad January 2013
The Laughing Brook
I love to go to the brook with a book.
Fern Glade is its name,
But do not tell too many or it will have fame.
Tranquility for everyone at time of need,
So go there simply where there is no greed.
This world would be a better place,
Think of people’s pace,
The ferns are beautiful near the brook,
You can close your eyes and think of the glade,
Brook and book.
© Yvonne Matheson
Time spins on with the atoms we are made of until they disperse and turn back into star dust. Patricia Turner, who has been with the gazette from the beginning and was a member of the Fellowship Of Australian Writers, has gone to sleep forever. We remember her as a wonderful poet who created intense feelings. Here is one of her poems.
Evening Drift
Long lie the shadows
Along the red-clawed tracks
A flattened rabbit stone-like
In the rut
Leaps all gauzy
Into the orange spears
Drilled by the setting sun
Into the soft nets
Drawn by the rising dusk
The afternoon breeze lies
Sleeping in the sulky swells
Which bide their time
Beneath the straight blue line.
© Patricia Turner † 2013
Joe Lake
Sonnet
Little jewel, eternal female rose,
Created from the rib of life and love;
The girl that steers and disciplines my prose,
Whose guiding rails, have energy enough. 4
My time’s advance goes back to you and more,
As smoking clouds of hope burn down the rain
To cool my running heels down to their core
That stopped the paranoia and the pain. 8
Flawed, I walk on water, throwing bread
To gods who reach from down below to rise
Towards the heavens and its growing dread
Until the rack of time calms its demise. 12
If you had told me of your secret fear,
I would have held you tight and kissed your tear.
© Joe Lake (Sonnets 2009
Fear Of Darkness A serial novel by Joe Lake.
(So far: Julie meets Susan, who says that she is from five hundred years in the future and gives Julie a ring to travel in different parallel universes. Susan warns Julie not to turn the ring by herself and says that there are dangerous hackers in the future. Julie turns the ring. The van turns into a spaceship that travels near Saturn. Julie and her husband fall asleep and, waking, they’re back at Cooee. Susan appears as a hologram when John has stepped out.)
“Luckily no one has interfered with us physically with all this multiple universes and future projections and antagonism between powers that seems to be going on,” says Julie.
“I’m sick of it. Why don’t we stow our things and drive off back to Devonport and the ferry?” says John.
“Let’s go,” says Julie.
John got into the armchair driver’s seat and turned the key. The starter motor turned with a whine but the engine didn’t start. “They want to keep us here,” says John.
(To be continued next month)
