I love him for that special look he gives me,
For the touch of his gentle fingers.’I love him for the warmth of his smile,
For the strong beat of his heart against mine.
I love him for the joy he brings me,
For that voice that thrills me.
I love him for his mind and for his body,
And Ah!
For such sweet secret things!
I do love him!
© Vi Woodhouse
Enter Glory
From heart to head
And mind to mouth
These lies entreating tongue
These tales, tall, we will invest
And elevation will become
In notion motion
Set to purpose
The deceptions unto deceit
These dawns, aflame, we will ignite
Set path to boneless feet
From glimmer, glow
And joke to jest
These truths revealing wing
These words we whispered green
Now songs unspoken singory
In time to tether
Once sightless scope
These hands we grasp and claim
These lines we cross, divided us
Where once we were the same
© Lauren Hay (Dripping Ink)
Trees
Clouds hang low across our forests
there’s a chill touch on the air
as the hearts of forest families
grow heavy with despair.
Tough men, have for generations
toiled hard at harvesting the trees
working on the slopes and valleys
swept by crisp mountain breeze.
Don’t tell them of the majesty
of those lofty trees they fell
for they recognize their beauty
in the timber milled to sell.
We must preserve some forests
no-one denies that need and
these men know of preservation,
meanwhile they’ve families to feed.
Somewhere there is a balance
between timber and grand sights,
swinging either way to an extreme
would create a saddening plight.
We all want our children’s children
to gaze up in rapturous awe
into tall majestic ancient trees
that were spared both axe and saw.
Towering over deep green mosses
and cool streams dark tannin stained
wending amongst roots and rocks
as for centuries they’ve remained.
So let’s preserve some grand expanses
forever untouched let them be
while other trees regenerate
to ensure our State’s prosperity.
© Pete Stratford
Florence Nightingale
At the age of six
Florence Nightingale constructed a graph
of the efficacy of prayer,
and found no correlation
between supplication and success,
however selfless the request.
Although she believed
in her youth that God had called her
to serve humanity,
it was to be through science
and not religiosity.
She was inspired
by the new discipline of statistics
and popularized pie-charts
and diagrams to illustrate
the data she collected.
her training of nurses
emphasized that cleanliness
was a surer way to health
than Godliness.
Her extraordinary success
in Scutari
was marked,
not by the laying on of hands,
but by the clearing of drains
blocked by dead horses.
Worshipped almost as a saint,
adulation never went to her head,
tho the Times of London crossword
even sported an anagram
“flit on cheering angel”,
she considered fame
false and fickle.
After her return from the Crimea,
she took to her bed
for forty years,
whilst some of the most influential men
in England
came to consult her
on Public Health policy.
Her legacy
is mostly a practical one,
but she also remains an inspiration
to those who aspire
to leave something
of worth.
© Mary Kille
Ian (My Son)
Stormy the horse he rode,
Fair youth wanes from sight at headlong speed,
Brown mare racing towards the road,
Rider bareback, hanging onto mane,
Emergency!
Another horse speeding into paddock with sister,
Thundering hooves, runaway horse,
Brother gallops towards the cry of little sister,
Grabbing the reins, Ian stops
damsel in distress,
Smiling pair trot to their mother,
A proud lad shows his devoted
love for his sister, Elza.
© Yvonne Matheson
Artist
Whilst some popular artists
gloat with glee as hoards of people,
who are uneducated in the arts,
praise this artist’s work while
The cerebral art work is often
condemned Until the artist dies and then the is sought,
Whilst many, once popular art pieces, go into land fill.
© Judy Brumby-Lake
Rainbows And Butterflies
In a reflection of remembrance,
one stands out above all others,
A special moment when youngest daughter
announced to her older sibling:
“Look, there goes a ‘flutterby’”;
In response, her savvy sister,
who has always been “Politically correct”,
replied: “No, it’s not. It’s a bloody fly!”
“Not quite,” I said, in fits of laughter,
stuttering to the then two and four-year-olds:
“It’s one of God’s great creations
who lives over the rainbow where
nanna is in The Father’s care.”
The youngest daughter then asked:
“If nanna is over the rainbow
won’t she need an umbrella?”
© Andrea Grant
We mourn the passing of…
Do we mourn for them or for ourselves?
What of us, now they’re gone?
We cry. We laugh and cry. We remember. We reflect and celebrate over drinks and nibbles after the funeral, after the pomp and ceremony.
Then we go home and thank our lucky stars it’s not us in an urn of ashes or in a coffin deep under the good earth.
How was it?
The funeral?
Yes.
Moving. Funny. Memories.
We’ll never forget – at least not straight away. Maybe later on thoughts will get lost in the maelstrom of living our daily lives.
But where are they now, the dearly departed? Are they really, truly dead or, perhaps, “in a better place”?
As in Heaven?
Or Hell. They were pretty rotten to others while they were alive.
They’ve found forgiveness. At rest in The Light.
But The Light is here, as we breathe and see, and work our backsides off to make our lives half decent before The Time arrives. If they are in “a better place”, why on Earth do we waste three score years and ten to get there? Why not just go directly to that “better place” and skip being born here?
Well, why not?
A Place
There is a place,
A state of grace,
Multitudes can trace
the wither race,
In gather-pace,
In lifelong chase
to see His face,
To believe, in case
the Entity is grace,
Transcending race,
And in this haste,
Time here, to waste,
There is a place.
© Michael Garrad November 2012
No One Heard A Note
Drowning in a sea of song,
As with chorus-birds
hidden in high green,
Competing calls in
beautiful harmony,
In the garden that lives
beneath the sun,
Every season is a concert
with an audience of one,
Rush, rush this jagged day,
Onward, onward to the grave,
And the song is sung,
And no one heard a note.
© Michael Garrad November 2012
Thirsty
I need a drink! Give me a drink!
You might think that I’m suffering - well yes, I am!
Heat and thirst are killing me,
Craining my life-force
And I’m wilting before your very eyes!
At times, the sky shows brief promise of relief
But day after day, the sun, a burning bronze ball
Sitting high in its supreme position,
Scorches me with deadly intensity -
I AM EARTH, I’m parched - HELP!
© June Maureen Hitchcock
New Scientist says that this young generation will live for a one hundred and twenty years. Good luck to them. My time is nearly up. I have no regrets.
My friend Bill, who came from Melbourne to settle here in Wynyard knows Helfgott, the Shine man. I heard Bill play Beethoven on the piano - what a talent. Bill provided music for my sonnet on Christianity and now we are trying to get someone to sing it. The melody went round and round my head once I’ve heard it. It’s a little like a very classy hymn.
We went to see the Burnie City Brass band at the art gallery and I was so impressed. I tried to be an amateur musician myself but unfortunately lacked any kind of talent as I could never get the tensions out of my body.
Judy and I had a roast of pork the other day. We put lots of garlic and onions and canola oil in with it. It was delicious and we reminisced how hotel-type meals are these days mass produced, frozen microwaved excuses for what once were deliciously cooked meals.
Never mind, we can’t bring the old days back, what, with boiled lamb, soggy peas, re-heated baked potatoes and with luck a lack-lustre watery gravy.
I wish you all a happy new year and hope that none of you will have to live to a hundred and twenty.
Explanation
The animals are not besmirched by sin;
Their lives resolve without the curse of hate.
Diseases try to kill them from within
And guilt for them is just an abstract state. 4
We cause a choice, the choice is our cause
And childhood traumas are soon rectified
For freedom of the will can choose its source
But new beginnings make us petrified. 8
Dynamics cause the brain into ideas
Of praise and worthiness and gratitude
Where blame and hate created all our fears,
Where we resent, forgive with attitude. 12
You can’t resent the soldier who must kill
For only then the soul usurps the will.
© Joe Lake (From Joe Lake’s Philosophical Sonnets)
Fear Of Darkness A serial novel by Joe Lake.
(So far: Julie meets Susan, the social worker, 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. Back in the van, the hologram of a man’s face appears and tells them that Susan gave the ring illegally and it is to be given back. Later, Susan’s hologram appears and tells them that they are being manipulated by hackers from the future and that Julie must turn the ring right side up and then they would forget what has occurred.
“Julie? I must have nodded off, what time is it?”
He found himself sitting in the niche at the kitchen table onto which he had rested his head.
“What?” Julie answered as she shook her head to get the drowsiness out of her system. She was sitting on the bed in their Winnebago mobile home, parked at Cooee beach, Burnie, Tasmania.
“How long have I been asleep?” asked John
“Couldn’t have been long. What was it we were going to do? You said, I remember, that we had to get fresh bread,” said Julie.
“Let’s get dressed and go into town. We can take the Vespa.”
“No, I want to stay in bed. You go,” Julie yawned.
“I remember now. The ring. You turned the ring and then something happened only I can’t remember what...”
Julie shook her head as she tried to pull the ring from her left hand. “I remember wanting to throw it away.”
“You can’t, if it won’t come off. Here, let me try.” He sat next to her on the bed and took her hand in his. Then he took a firm hold of the ring and tried to pull it off. It wouldn’t come. “I’ll get a little butter from the fridge.” He went to get the butter.
Julie tried to twist the ring off and, accidently turned its face downward at which there was a blinding flash of light in the van, an intense rush of noise as from a jet engine and then complete darkness. “John?” Julie called into the blackness. She was still sitting on the bed.
“I’m over here. I can’t see you. Where are you? Have I gone blind?”
“I can’t see you either, not a thing,” answered Julie from the darkness. The whooshing sound continued and the van was shaking as if an aircraft hits turbulence. Slowly, Julie’s sight came back. Outside the van’s windows it was night and she could see a well-lit planet with rings of stardust streaming, circling, enveloping, spinning around it. “I’m dreaming again,” she said. “We seem to be passing the planet, Saturn.
(To be continued next month)
NINE YEARS OF
EUROPA POETS’ GAZETTE
No meeting in January
Burnie Regional Art Gallery, First Saturday in the month, February 5, 2-4pm
