Too many poems
Cannot choose
Too many photos
Overwhelmed
Beauty
Camping
Coast
Australia
Too many layers
To my life
Is that what
getting old
means
So many layers
Lost the thread
How to find my way
Back
Remember
Or don’t
If it’s past
Give it up
Go ahead
Yet I hesitate
People left behind
Names on a list
Names on my phone
Some forgotten
Some ignored
For years
For months
Can I reconnect
Can I remember
Should I remember
Too many layers
So many countries
Here I am
Trees surpass people
Beautiful reliable diverse
Providing food and living space
To birds and animals
Providing shade and inspiration
To humans
Trees give long lasting comfort and acceptance
The colours, the shapes, the textures
Always inspiring
More beautiful
Than anything made by humans
More beautiful than any sculpture
Any building, any vehicle
Especially eucalypts
Their variety their shapes
their colours, their textures
overwhelming
surprising
delights
trees
Objects around
are not mundane
Each one is unique
Handmade by someone
I purchased them
Their provenance forgotten
Their creator unknown
Undocumented
The objects are here
Surround me
Everyday
Do I see them?
Do I overlook them?
The strange polka-dotted beast
from South Africa
A gift from Gabriel
The soft sculpture of a woman
Diddy-wa-diddy
A craft shop visit with Pilar
in the Midwest USA
Once my best friend and confidante
who years later rejected our friendship
The horse and carriage
from recycled bits of metal
Made in Pakistan
The Kansas City ceramic cow
The Kibera 8 collage, a slum in Nairobi
The beachside print by Sheila
inspired by Tucacas
Emerald Suites Venezuela
The camel train oil painting
from a door-to-door salesman artist
in Islamabad Pakistan
The Faberge glass cat
from my aunt in Florida
How did it get to me?
Muddled past
All are here now
Objects around me
Leaving the cinema at night
surprised I can still drive
I am not a character in a film
The streets are Canberra
not France
The lights are shining
on Lake Burley Griffin
Watching movies
brings another reality
a heightened unreality
of the real
Movies take me
in and out of reality
With more space
More options
Everything slightly off
Not quite right
Not quite normal
The reality of movies
More than real
Life worth living
Even if it’s not my life
I love movies!
Yerrabi Track
Namadgi National Park
Australian Capital Territory
Why move
Just sit
Look
Brindabella mountains
Toothy line to sky
View through burned
Gum trees
Silence
Only one bird
Forest burnt out
What now?
Forward
Write your way
through
Words leaving a trace
On the rock
Comfort zone
Voices
distant
Winter day
Let go
Say no more
Underwater
There is so much
we do not see
We watch the waves
Maybe the whales breaching
But what I want to see
is there
underneath
demanding I change
my frame of reference
from warmth to chill
from light to muted
Adjust your body
Adjust your eyes
Head down
Keep looking
immersed
in water environment
as you never are
in air
walking standing breathing
seeing objects colours
floating in the ocean
Adjust
Accept
Lose track
So that
Astonished
When you raise your head
out of the water
the world is still there
And you will return
Have you heard that expression or did I make it up?
That’s how I felt when I read the positive feedback about my book Tracking the Human in an email from a friend in Kansas City, Missouri, who lives in the neighbourhood where my mother lived.
Here’s what Anne said about Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time:
“You did a fine job on your book Tracking the Human. What a great approach to telling your father’s story – your painstaking search for facts bring him to life through the device of fiction. Your biography is so readable and so poignant. I’m amazed and moved by what your father – and your mother – overcame. Your depiction of the hobo life is fascinating. What a story of survival.
Your book is a generous exercise in reaching out to the past to understand a man who in so many ways was not kind to you. You too are a survivor. Sending love to you and congratulations on completing this project and doing it so well.”
Many many thanks to Anne. Everyone’s feedback to Tracking the Human is much appreciated.
If you haven’t read Tracking the Human yet, you can purchase a copy on http://www.lulu.com. It’s also available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon websites, but they pay the author very little.
Thanks again for your interest!!
I would like to share information about my book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time which I finished writing in January 2020. Because of the COVID19 pandemic there was no possibility of traveling from my current home in Canberra, Australia to the USA to launch the book.
Many years after being disowned by my father and after his death (1971), I made a decision to reconcile with him – with his memory – to construct a portrait of a human being that I could respect. I wrote a novel Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time based on data I collected about my father’s contacts with the justice system in the USA. He was in and out of jails, prisons and mental health institutions (known as asylums) for many years.
The book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time is available on line at www.lulu.com.
Also available on Amazon, but they pay the authors very little.
If you do purchase and read the book, I would very much appreciate your feedback,
on my blog http://www.familyfiction.comor by email at pamela@tucacas.info.
Here’s a comment about Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time from my friend Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University Professor of English and Law, emerita.
It being Presidents Day here, I took the day off from politics and paperwork (a euphemism for my present stasis) to read your novel. So delicious! It’s really, really good. I do really wish you’d been able to launch it in Kansas City MO.
If you want to situate your novel thematically in our American literary tradition I’d like to stress its fit into our deeply held embrace of the individualistic self-made man myth — so
destructively sexist and racist in my view — as set forth so brilliantly by F. Scott Fitzgerald in *The Great Gatsby.*
Thanks for your interest!
Pamela Hutchison Collett
So much talk
about 2020
Such a shocker
Crap year
Extraordinary
Unprecedented
Next year must be better
Over and over
Talk talk talk
Yet 2020 was
just another year
On it went
and now it’s gone
Another year arrives
2021
How long will it take
to remember
to write it down
Instead of continuing
to write 2020
with the symmetry
of the repeating numbers
To my family, friends and readers of my blog,
A year ending. Over and over again people made comments that this year 2020 was “unprecedented”… Yet there are always precedents… previous bush fires, previous pandemics, previous elections…. This year they all came together in a powerful punch.
I finished a book in January 2020, but because of the COVID19 pandemic there was no possibility of traveling from my current home in Canberra, Australia to the USA to launch the book. I ordered a few copies for myself and put the books in a closet, postponing my plan to launch the book in Kansas City, Missouri, Vinita and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I had spent a few years thinking, researching, writing, rewriting… a book about my father W. Lon Hutchison… about a person I didn’t really know. To say I should have known my own father is not correct. At the time of my upbringing, (born 1945), at the place of my upbringing, (Kansas City, Missouri, USA), parents were unknown quantities to their children. Parents were power, control, but not people. Children had no “rights” to know anything about their parents. Children were just there to do what they were told to do, go where they were told to go, like objects on a chess board… moved around according to their all powerful, all knowing parents.
Many years after being disowned by my father, many years after his death (1971), I made a decision to reconcile with him – with his memory – to construct a portrait of a human being that I could respect.
I wrote a novel based on data I collected about my father’s contacts with the justice system in the USA. He was in and out of jails, prisons and mental health institutions (known as asylums) for many years.
With the current reality of COVID19, travel from Australia to the USA to launch the book is very unlikely for many months. Meanwhile, the book Tracking the Human: nobody’s a long time is available on line at www.lulu.com.
If you do purchase and read the book, I would very much appreciate your feedback, on my blog or by email at pamela@tucacas.info.
Thanks!
Tracking the Human: nobody's a long time 