Currently there is a massive detour in place which will more than double my commute time. There is also an inconvenient pandemic…
My wondering is this: do we take the opportunities to enjoy the present enough? I enjoyed my short commute. I also enjoyed masklessness and avoiding crowds for personal rather than family health reasons.
Do we appreciate the now enough? For we, wee wisps, are so fleeting.
(Here is a poem I wrote for a poetry competition. I did not win but i do not mind).
A Fine Drive to Stratford
Following mustard lines
Mountain on my right
Dressed in teal and cobalt
He steals the show.
The sky is a theatre
With make-up-bruise purple
Lemon splashes,
Scumbles of deep purple and ochre
Umber and ecru glazed with dusk-pink flashing
And clouds
Dry-brushed in creamy silver-top-milk blue.
Further on, the mountain plays hide and seek
Peeping from behind duck egg blue strokes
He expands in turquoise stipples
And flashes, not to me
But to Pīhanga, primed in winter white.
Someone has cut their hedge
Etching cinnamon into sage
And the flaxes in navy ink
Are sublime backdrops
For day-glo dabs of morning road cones.
My favourite, though, is the solitary bull
Framed in a fresco of army green.
Luminous.
A model.
His back: a coppery russet
Alla prima, a confident cameo
Staring, a backlit Bond
His face a raunchy pink in the dawn.
Then plum shadows reach out
Striping mustard lines
Between impasto strikes of flashing light
On an imperfect cambered corner
And me, a fleeting wisp.
(2021)
The Teaching Tree 