The intertidal zone

I was going to say no to this suggestion from Claire, from Mary; I’m not a poet. On the other hand, it looked like more fun to join in, and I’ve written a few poems I’m not entirely unhappy with. Thanks, Mary. Thanks, Claire.

Firewalkers

We say yes to the queue
of people who look like us.

Yes to the woman giving tickets
in exchange for our socks and shoes.

Yes to the wait on winter asphalt,
Yes to the doctor checking soles.

We say yes, I am ready
yes, hold my hand
yes grass, yes fire
But oh!

at the brink

no. No, no. Our feet say no.

And yet the queue, the crowd, the doctor and the drummers;
and over there, our proud shoes wait.

We say, go. Plunge, wade, leap, whimper, hoppit!

Later, we hold our feet. We murmur to our toes.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Back cover blurb:

“An island in a bleak harbour; an isolated quarantine station where a group of nurses works tirelessly to care for sailors and immigrants recovering from the effects of the long sea voyage to the new land.

Kahu swims ashore, searching for a woman. Young nurse Liesel, caught in a passionate triangle, is faced with choices both harrowing and intoxicating. Martha, who oversees the hospital and guides the community, is making a kind of experiment with life.

Some on the island are too sick to live. Others flame with life. The island is cradle and crucible.

Penelope Todd’s first novel for adults is full of brilliantly drawn characters and a narrative which sweeps the reader along with its power. This is literary fiction of the highest quality, and an intensely romantic page-turner.”

It ‘s tiny, the size of half an s, in the middle of my screen. It creeps along the line of print, negotiating ‘trucks and drivers’ with slow aplomb.

Little does the spider know that the creatrice of worlds is about to press the red cross in the corner of the screen. It’s flipped into a new reality: teetering on the rim of my daughter’s funky glasses, staring into the green of her eye. Should I change the screen-saver to a field of grass, or a web? Or tell the spider nothing’s really changed; the merest membrane’s been removed. It’s all in the way it seems.

Why shouldn’t this happen to us?

One day we’re complacently decoding the same old same old, then zip, that background’s whipped away, and everything looks strange — we’re flipped into one of our other realitites: an imagining, a work of ‘fiction’, the dream behind the substance.

(In which case, don’t panic: keep your feet on the screen and make for the titanium rim at the edge of the world.)

What’s to be said about moths? Quiet night messengers, moon-wed, subtly toned and always rewarding inspection. I can’t recall photographing this one although I did so recently (Correction: I didn’t. It’s Jonathan’s handiwork. What a memory. Thanks, J) Moths make themselves forgettable, seeking light but never lime-light. Earlier this week, another came in through the kitchen window, aiming for the light above the bench. I turned that off. It made for the one above the table and flattened itself against a high wall. I flicked it into a cup and took it back outside to go and hunt the moon.

According to the OED, moths have two sets of broad wings covered in microscopic scales, and lack the clubbed antennae of butterflies.

Penguin Dictionary of Symbols : said to shrivel the leaf on which it settles, the ‘night butterfly’ is the symbol of the soul seeking the godhead and consumed by a mystical love.