Colours
Outside the bedroom window
Red-orange and yellow-leaved trees
Bright colours
soon to fade
falling to the ground
Trees decked in colours
Behaving like flowers
Bees unimpressed
Black and white magpies flying in and out
A lone cyclist struggles up the hill
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 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
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
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 personThinking 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
Tracking the Human: nobody's a long time 