Road Kill

or how to be undepressed

Drive the joyful way

Not the quickest

Notice the dead rabbit

 in the road

Picked at by

a large black raven

Quietly move towards it

in an electric vehicle

Honk the bird

out of the way

Notice

Twelve or more

pink crested galahs on a wire

usually seen on the ground

pecking away

while pushing Eliana’s pram

she’s watching

as am I

as we quietly creep closer

whoosh they fly away

Notice

Old friends

the eucalypts

arching

swaying

more creative

in their shapes

and colours

than my paintings

Drive the joyful way

Notice

Australia Australian Broadcasting Corporation book review Book titles camping Canberra Charles Eugene Purdy Christian Science Dean Koontz E. S. Hutchison Eastern Oklahoma State Mental Hospital family and fiction father fiction Gary Snyder Helen Purdy Kansas Kansas City Kenneth Patchen Kenya Kosciusko National Park Life Expectancy Love Pirate MidWest Missouri Nairobi New South Wales nobody’s a long time novel novels as history Oakland Oklahoma Pinch River poetry public library reconciliation title Tracking the Human trees Tulsa Tulsa Daily World USA Vinita W. Lon Hutchison Whales

Australia Australian Broadcasting Corporation book review Book titles camping Canberra Charles Eugene Purdy Christian Science Dean Koontz E. S. Hutchison Eastern Oklahoma State Mental Hospital family and fiction father fiction Gary Snyder Helen Purdy Kansas Kansas City Kenneth Patchen Kenya Kosciusko National Park Life Expectancy Love Pirate MidWest Missouri Nairobi New South Wales nobody’s a long time novel novels as history Oakland Oklahoma Pinch River poetry public library reconciliation title Tracking the Human trees Tulsa Tulsa Daily World USA Vinita W. Lon Hutchison Whales

Australia Australian Broadcasting Corporation book review Book titles camping Canberra Charles Eugene Purdy Christian Science Dean Koontz E. S. Hutchison Eastern Oklahoma State Mental Hospital family and fiction father fiction Gary Snyder Helen Purdy Kansas Kansas City Kenneth Patchen Kenya Kosciusko National Park Life Expectancy Love Pirate MidWest Missouri Nairobi New South Wales nobody’s a long time novel novels as history Oakland Oklahoma Pinch River poetry public library reconciliation title Tracking the Human trees Tulsa Tulsa Daily World USA Vinita W. Lon Hutchison Whales

Trees

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

Homage to Callum Brae Nature Reserve, Canberra, Australia

Clouds and Trees

Looking out the window

through the glass sliding door

Clouds moving across the sky

Grey underbellies

White above

Illuminated by the sun

Blue patches in between

Always moving

Changing shapes

Cloud diversity

 

Tree diversity

Branches straight

Branches convoluted

Branches intertwined

Branches bare

Branches with leaves

Moving with the wind

Trunks stationery

Roots underneath

Out of sight

Pushing earth

Enveloping rocks

Clinging to the side

of eroded stream beds

 

Invisible movement

of trees

Visible movement

of clouds

 

Look up again

 

Sky more blue

Clouds

motionless

Suspended

Swallowed up

One wisp drifts away

Dissolving in the blue

Shapes slowly shifting

Grey and white masses

Silhouette flying across

small black bird

 

The Wrong Amazon

Talking with the delivery guy
about farming
He smells of cigarettes
I want to tell him
to stop smoking
But I don’t
I listen and find out
His was a farming family
Hard life
Father told him
Don’t be a farmer
So he’s a delivery person




Thinking about land
every day
The destruction
of Mother Earth
Thousands of hectares
every day
deforested in Australia
Trees cut down
Amazon burning
As one youth activist
quipped on a poster
The wrong Amazon is burning

I don’t even know
what a hectare is
I have never lived
on a farm
I have lived
in cities and towns
on six continents

Hiking in the bush
just outside town
I see parched earth
Erosion
like the deep cut
on my arm
But the cut was
sewed up
closed up
Now healed
Leaving only a slightly
pink and purple scar




How to heal the earth?
Some farmers know how
The earth can be renewed
But forcing the land
to yield immediate results
leads to
long-term destruction
Farmers becoming
delivery people







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