Max I hope that you have your water-wings
Lismore that takes me back did a reading there once well it was a poetry
slam (did not win mind you!)
Cheers P
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 27 May 2009 01:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: holiday snap
Holiday Snap with Antechinus
In the 'big scrub' bush hills up behind
Mullumbimby, northern New South Wales,
my son showed me round: winding
up a long narrow unsealed track
to his rented big tin shed, mostly set up
as his music recording studio, with tiny
living quarters installed in one corner,
unpainted ceilings, a gas cooker,
windows that look over lush trees
to a half circle of timbered cliffs
and during the (unreliable) wet season
waterfalls waterfalls waterfalls.
A big weather system - said to be from
the Himalayas! - had been pouring steadily
on the region for many hours; his radio was on:
'flooding on the Clarence River threatens
the town of Lismore' nearby, the new levee,
eleven metres high, the predicted flood
ten metres something, changed upwards every hour.
Our one road soon closed; before others were,
people were advised to 'self-evacuate'.
Electricity failed almost everywhere;
we heard the power spokesman say:
'yairs, we've had thirty thousand phone calls,
and we thank people for their patience'.
The websites of the river system showed
graphs for each creek, levels rising, rising,
if near the coast falling a bit at low tide,
rising again. Settling in for a quiet time,
we went to bed early. Should I dislodge
the big huntsman spider from its corner?
No, ignore it, it should ignore me, and did.
Should a trap be set again for the rodents
nightly visiting the pantry? Of course, somewhere
warm and dry is what they need just now.
Better if trapping meant caging, but
it hasn't worked. The late Steve Irwin's
'Australia Zoo', not far away, might even pay
for some of these deserving indigenes.
See! between the rice and the rolled oats
big ears and eyes, tremulously staring back
at us ... no, set the trap to snap.
Next morning, not that precious antechinus
(the one that in the mating season
exerts himself to death upon the female -
self-evacuating? - to perpetuate their kind;
no, merely a mouse, not quite extinguished,
deserving release into the wet bush again.
Wednesday 27 May 2009
Max Richards
now safely back in dry Melbourne
------------------------------------------------------------
This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 8.5.339 / Virus Database: 270.12.39/2134 - Release Date: 05/25/09
18:14:00
|