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On holidays
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Student BMJ
On holidays
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Holidays are for dreaming.  It is now my pleasure to have before me a palette of coloured time.  Breakfast,  Eggs and ham fresh-sliced taken like a prince at 10 am under a pergola shade
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On holidays

posted at 28/12/2012 2:09 AM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 2955
First: 10/3/2009
Last: 26/5/2013
Holidays are for dreaming. 

It is now my pleasure
to have before me
a palette of coloured time. 

Breakfast, 
Eggs and ham fresh-sliced
taken like a prince at 10 am
under a pergola
shaded from  squinting sunshine.
cooled by a rising NE'er
which will fill stiff sails today. 

It is a time of slow breaths, 
of creativity, 
of inner listening...
of cricket commentators
gurgling happy on the radio
with their word-stream
of endless childhood summers
a brief crescendo, 
- a near-dropped catch at square leg
while the diminuendo of my thoughts
descend into memories
and a near-dropped book taken
at mid-off by a happy slumberer.

Holidays are my Dreaming. 
Of reading the unread, 
...the emerging of that poem
like a wizened frog
from the dried creek bed
of my own drought
or of kneading bread
on a cool granite..
feel the dough's spring
to then emerge 
the host
in a tin blackened
by an ancient liturgy. 

On holidays
I am a lung fish
come to the surface
of this airless pond
of my vocation, 
gulping down sweet air, 
to once again swim off
serpentine
in the dark deep
of this billabong.

Odysseus. 28 December 2012
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Re: On holidays

posted at 29/12/2012 11:21 PM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 2955
First: 10/3/2009
Last: 26/5/2013
I threw my paper in a bottle into the vast ocean that someone might pick it up on a wind swept shore and read. That for someone it might speak. 
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Re: On holidays

posted at 30/12/2012 1:49 AM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 107
First: 13/3/2012
Last: 22/5/2013
Those in the ice and snow
know not the Christmas 
of heat, lethargy
and peaceful dreaming

Only those in the know
not the snow
appreciate the wisdom 
or your words of wonder or

Remember the same dreams
Long for the same escape
Appreciate the bliss of
doing nothing on the outside


As Charlie Brown once said, sitting on the ground, his back against the tree, dreaming of universes beyond our imagination, solving problems unsolvable, deciding what's for dinner,

"it's only loafing if they can prove it."

Enjoy.
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Re: On holidays

posted at 30/12/2012 2:28 AM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 2955
First: 10/3/2009
Last: 26/5/2013

Thank you for reading the note in my bottle, Linda.

I have known many droughts in Christmas. I used to spend my adolescence each summer holidays on my uncle's sheep station which was not far from the Moonie River. The earth shimmered in the heat, watery mirages on the horizon and the crows picked dried flesh of woollen carcasses with straightening legs. It still felt like Christmas. We have a series of lovely Australian Christmas Carols which still evoke goose bumps. There is one about three drovers mustering sheep and with the allusion to the Three Wise Men. It is called Three Drovers.


Drought Year  by Judith Wright

That time of drought the embered air

burned to the roots of timber and grass. 

The crackling lime-scrub would not bear

and Mooni Creek was sand that year. 

The dingo's cry was strange to hear.

I heard the dingoes cry 

in the scrub on the Thirty-mile Dry.

I saw the wedgetail take his fill

perching on the seething skull. 

I saw the eel wither where he curled 

in the last blood-drop of a spent world.

I heard the bone whisper in the hide

of the big red horse that lay where he died. 

Prop that horse up, make him stand, 

hoofs turned down in the bitter sand

make him stand at the gate of the Thirty-mile Dry. 

Turn this way and you will die- 

and strange and loud was the dingoes' cry. 




This is one of the carols called Christmas Day by John Wheeler

The north wind is tossing the leaves.
The red dust is over the town;
The sparrows are under the eaves,
And the grass in the paddock is brown;
As we lift up our voices and sing,
To the Christ-child the heavenly King.

The tree ferns in green gullies sway;
The cool stream flows silently by;
The joy bells are greeting the day,
And the chimes are adrift in the sky,
As we lift up our voices and sing,
To the Christ-child the heavenly King.

 

Note:-
A north wind in Australia is a hot wind.
When it is not hot, it is hotter.

http://tww.id.au/christmas/carol-day.html

 

It is all what you are used to and it all evokes different music to a universal theme. 

 

Odysseus
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Re: On holidays

posted at 30/12/2012 11:26 PM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 2955
First: 10/3/2009
Last: 26/5/2013
I took  my son for a long bike ride yesterday along a bike track which followed a creek leading down to the sea near the airport. It wove under the concrete freeway, past esturine mashlands, grasslands, and a golf links which was once my great grandfather's vineyard where for eons aboriginal men danced like emus at night at their bora ring.

It is a ribbon of civlisation taking us past long grass in which we know lurks danger, with blue wrens with their dowdy hens and chestnut and cheaky zebra finches. We halted as a young black snake warming his red belly slithered off the track; prudence gave him right of way. We saw some Indian men with a cast net throwing it into the creek with one man waist-deep in water we both know is the home of  bull sharks.

This track is a modern intrusion. We have not tamed the world but think we have. It will continue long after the concrete freeway's steel reinforcing rods have expanded with the salt air and crumbled. The blue wrens will dart from paspallum stalks with erect little tails and the snakes will search for frogs, the bullrushes will hide creatures in their sedges and the mangroves will send aerial roots like asparagus nurturing fish and crabs as the tide transforms this world for just a while.

We retreat before dark to the safety of civlisation, leaving the night sky to fall on the marsh lands and release the night to roam at will where no man dare to go. 

Odysseus
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Re: On holidays

posted at 11/1/2013 3:17 AM GMT on bmj.com
Posts: 2955
First: 10/3/2009
Last: 26/5/2013
Pandanus palms, white sand and surf. Our favourite, Noosa nestles beside a national park. 
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