Every now and then, Eurobodalla Writers showcase our member’s wonderful stories. Remember, these stories belong to the writers and may not be copied or used without the author’s permission.

Wheels of Fortune
John Longhurst

Everyone peered at the curve.

The nursery manager pointed at the curve.

The curve said it all.

“It’s a disaster” he lectured. “You guys are flattening the wrong curve. We need to grow the numbers. Our sales are rooted.”

Slightest of chuckles. Ever so slight in fact.

“You know it’s the best soil in the state not the Tamani Desert. We should be able to grow stuff. Sell stuff. Don’t give me that shit about you all being in wheelchairs. We have to compete, compete, compete. Every second business around here is a bloody nursery, and here we are with every staff member in a wheelchair trying to grow and sell plants to the able-bodied when they are getting the same or better up the road without having to bend over to hear your sales pitch. We’ve got a month to turn the business around or we go into receivership. Now pump up your tyres and get out there and get innovative.”

His face reddened.

“Otherwise, I might as well change the name of this nursery to GARDENS WERE US. Now don’t sit around all day….. get off your ar…..” He paused. “Well, don’t sit around here………” and on he went.

He waddled off to his office. He had a good heart, but these staff meetings didn’t highlight his sensitive side. The business concept was so altruistic—employment for the disabled and relying on the goodwill of the able public to support sales. All fine when the economy was ticking over, but the current recession meant people shopped with their feet above shopping with the wheelies.

The able-bodied manager waddled off to his office. The staff meeting had its usual impact: long faces, sighs, and complaints.

“Geez, he can be an arsehole. Sometimes, I think we are just wheeling round in circles. We have tried every innovative technique to boost sales. You know just the other day, I wrapped a bandage around my head for an extra bit of sympathy, but the bloody customer just thought the plants were infectious. It’s pretty difficult growing and tending to plants by the disabled for the abled. Crikey, I keep stretching my arm watering the bloody plants from top down.”

A collective groan. It was going to be another one of chief complainant, Maria’s speeches. Her wheelchair squeaked as she continued.

“You know that bloody manager wanted me to grow some exotic bamboo he is keen on…. now how am I supposed to tend to two-metre-high bamboo…… and the watering….. whinge whinge… he goes on about the tops of the plants needing watering…… I tell you it is causing a lot of strain on my shoulders and arms…. and the smell….. you know, being at arse height to everyone….. geez….let’s get the union involved.”

Mae, the union delegate, called for calm.

“From here on let’s work in accordance with our ability. Let’s water at wheelchair height. Let’s tend the plants at wheelchair height. Basically, let’s run the business at wheelchair height.”

Nods of agreement were as good as a vote.

The impact on the nursery was profound. Plants at able-bodied eye level basically did a U-turn to seek out the new care arrangements, resulting in a canopy of brown stems and branches confronting the eyes of the able-bodied shopper. It was the equivalent of an offensive plant ‘brown eye’ for the able-bodied shopper.

‘A BLOOMIN’ DISGRACE’ headlined the News Ltd owned local daily paper. The local radio shock jock called the workers ‘militant wheelchair wankers’ and called for anti-anti-discrimination

legislation. Even Costa ran an obituary piece about the nursery on The ABC’s GARDENING AUSTRALIA.

Sales plummeted. The manager fumed.

He pleaded for a return to normal watering and tendering, but the workers were now happy and could enjoy the fruits of their labour at eye level. He even had to remove his favourite sunflowers to the sanctity of the stairwell behind his office.

It was an industrial dispute of a magnitude never before in the horticultural industry.

Grace, lead organiser from the Wheelchair Workers Union, was called in and listened and listened and listened. She took notes, she inspected, she wheeled herself around. She sighed, she consulted, she looked at the manager’s curve.

A mass meeting was called and a plan outlined.

The nursery was redesigned by a wheelchair architect to meet the specifications of the workforce. Door frames were lowered to a metre and a maze of boardwalks created a tunnel effect below the new canopy, linking the various sections of the nursery. The new design was all about the workers’ and plants’ abilities as opposed to the clientele’s comforts. The needs of able-bodied humans were minimised. Plants were allowed to flourish naturally in accordance with the environment as opposed to the manager’s whims. The staff were able to identify the areas where the plants would flourish best as opposed to placing them to catch the customer’s eye. The migrant wheelchair workers on day release from the local detention centre administered sections that showcased their country of origin.

The thickness of the canopy could be manipulated to simulate various climates.

A wheel through the nursery was the equivalent of a bush ‘walk’ through a range of climate and geographical zones. The customer would be forced to discover as opposed to shop for preconceived

ideas about their plant desires. They could easily traverse the savanna of the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania, enjoy the highlands of Papua New Guinea and dip into the jungles of South America in a morning visit.

At wheelchair level, plants bloomed under the new canopy. Flowers now curved and dipped under to enjoy the new care. Fronds of reds and purples previously defeated by the sun now sprouted from stems. Ancient plants that were prized when the pre-neanderthal population were on the verge of standing revived under care, returning to the present day with prehistoric vines thickening and curling and then holding python-like, the most delicate of blooms by their stems. A fragility and balance that mesmerised the eye. The canopy filtered light and allowed the growth of sensitive blue and mauve petals that produced a perfume that lingered at ground level before fading upwards. The sensation teased able-bodied senses. The canopy’s new angles and piecework features filtered the sun to produce dazzling moving spotlights of gold and silver throughout the day. The silence of the wheelchairs meant the never-before-grown, footstep-sensitive plants ventured out like shy platypi. All the tunnels converged to the magnificent Rainbow Plant. A carnivorous plant that previously only sprouted in the individual colours of the rainbow was treated with such care and with an organic diet of locally produced shaves of meat that it combined all colours in one eye-watering firework spectacle. It all left the observer in a euphoric drug-blissed sensory state.

Yet another array of colours and perfumes would open up with the moonlight. Evening primrose, moon flowers, night gladiolus and even the Dutchman Pipe Cactus relished the care and delivered folds of colour. The exotic Casablanca Lily thrived and lifted the nursery to a richness of perfume that peaked at midnight and floated the observer to a dream.

The nursery went to twenty-four-hour trading.

The nursery became a haven for wellness and healing and a point of referral for progressive medicos dealing with chronic patient pain.

The news swept through the disabled community.

Queues of wheelchairs lined the entrance. Sales boomed. The sales curve spiked.

Even the nursery manager smiled.

In fact, business was so good that tensions emerged from the able-bodied community. There was a lack of able-bodied car parks, for starters, and the able-bodied toilets were often locked or used for storage. Water fountains were at wheelchair height.

A wheelchair hire section was opened for the abled-bodied to fully appreciate the nursery.

At the request of the Local Member of Parliament, the new nursery was opened by the Minister for Disability and, fittingly, with her speech impediment, began,

“De local Member has fought very hard for dis approval. Congratulations on his success. I would like to thank dis member for dis opportunity to open de nursery. I am not exaggerating when I say that dis pleasure really is a result of dis loyal staff, and it is dis unity inspired by dis Grace and dis Mae who are sitting amongst us. It really has transformed dis location.”

She then straightened her back for her final words.

“Dis respect for the disabled has delivered a nursery not only for the disabled but dis abled body community as well.”

Whisper
Karen Kentwell

Meredith couldn’t care less if people found out. Only twelve steps, they urged her. A few months, they said, and her life could change forever. But being invisible meant something to her.  First, she had to admit that she was no longer in control. Chester helped her with that. He forced her to look in the mirror, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her till her teeth clacked together, saliva spraying from her mouth. Only when she saw the last of her spit drip onto the bathroom tiles did a lightbulb flash in her brain.  The addiction had her in its clutches, and she couldn’t fall any lower.

The first session was brutal. She sat silently in the circle, all eyes on her. It took three more sessions before she was ready to join in properly.

She whispered,

              ‘My name is Meredith, and I am an alcoholic.’

Her words quenched the silence of the circle. But then came applause, and they welcomed her into their club. It did feel as good as they said it would. Meredith ticked it off the list.

Next, she needed to give herself over to a higher power. Her mentor, Josh, said,

‘At the very least, consider asking God for help. It’s worked for all of us.’

But religion wasn’t too attractive to Meredith. The memory of it took her back to her childhood, caught ‘out of bounds’ in the bushes behind the school chapel. She and Tommy Rogers played an innocent child’s game. Sister Amina found them with their legs akimbo, tears of joyful laughter rolling down their dirt-smudged faces. Of course, the emotionally incompetent nun assumed other shenanigans were going on, so she marched the pair to the Headmistress for punishment. Those vicious licks from a leather strap burned Meredith’s skin and left a dark mark on her soul. She never forgot the injustice of it.

Meredith was sent to St Catherine’s Home for Uncontrollable Girls on the banks of the river Murray in 1960. She was just sixteen. Having lost her privileges again, she lay on the grass with Frankie, the gardener, one lazy Sunday afternoon. He whispered,

           ‘Jeez Mer, the nuns sure ‘av got it in for youse.’ He leaned over and squeezed her thigh, offering her a swig from his warm West End Long Neck.  Meredith just smiled and planned her next rebellion.

St Catherine’s closed a year later. Child Welfare discovered Meredith had vanished, leaving behind a day-old baby tucked up in a drawer in her room. Vicious whispers raced through the community faster than bushfire smoke. People said maybe the nuns had ‘done her in.’ It caused a big stink.

By 1964, Meredith had settled in Murray Bridge, away from her past. She had a job and said ‘yes’ to Bill Hackley. They married at the courthouse; she wasn’t wearing white. Each month, when Bill left her alone for his Lodge meeting, he’d dig his fingernails into Meredith’s forearm, pull her in close and whisper,

‘Shh Mer, you be careful, my love.  Don’t go braggin’ to anyone ‘bout my meetin’, and you watch what you say to those ladies you mix with.’

Meredith had a drink in her hand by noon most days, so his secret was safe.

Tuesday afternoons were her favourite. The busy market in town heaved with people, and she’d disappear into the crowds, intoxicated by the noise and feeling deliciously tipsy from her lunchtime top-up.

One day, as Meredith meandered between the stalls, a young woman with a toddler in tow flagged her down.

              ‘Are you Meredith Brown?’ she whispered.

              ‘I used to be,’ said Meredith. ‘But it’s Hackley now.’

The woman pushed the toddler forward and announced, ‘This is your son, Chester.’ Meredith’s vision blurred as the alcohol briefly left her body.  She thought she had made herself invisible, but they found her anyway.

It took a lot longer to be cured than they said. Her little boy had grown into a man before Meredith took the oath. There had been amends to make – people she’d wronged who needed to be righted. A new life to live. A way to give back.

In the end, Meredith completed all twelve steps, and the label ‘uncontrollable’ slid from her shoulders. With her own circle of reformers to care for now, she held up her hands and whispered, ‘My name is Meredith, and I am here.’

Cigarettes Vietnam
Don Pollock

Noise, that throbbing, insistent, irritating noise of many aircraft engines starting, awoke him from a deep sleep.  Instantly alert, still prone but aware that a big op was on, so some more poor bastards were going to die today.  For bloody what!  No need for an early morning call to get him out of bed.  Jet engines whining, helicopter blades flapping and piston engines coughing, propelled him out of bed to the showers, where he shaved, still unsettled from the abrupt wakening and his thoughts.  Another day of operations and he contemplated all the acts of bastardry that would envelop him. 

He dressed quickly.  Underpants, socks, flying suit overalls and boots, followed by the survival jacket and shoulder holster with the Colt 45 pistol and slouch hat, completed his apparel for the day.  He kept all his daily personal needs (wallet, handkerchiefs, cigarettes, crutch powder) in the flying suit.  Operational items (medical kit, flares, maps, spare ammo) were stored in the survival jacket. His stomach was not complaining this morning with diarrhoea discomfort, not yet anyway, so he took a pill to try and control any possible later drama in his gut.

Horizontal rain, the first of his challenges, blurred his vision as he trotted towards operations.  Somehow, the rain contrived to get past his hat and a trickle down his back added to his discomfort.  Enough rain to make you miserable but not sufficient to stop a war and all its waste.  The Ops Room gave him the opportunity for his first cigarette of the day. 

He dried his hands under his armpits; useless to attempt lighting a cigarette with wet hands.  Within a week of arriving in the country, he had given up rolling his own cigarettes.  Impossible to roll a fag in a country where the humid atmosphere caused even your fingertips to sweat.  Besides, tailor-mades were dirt cheap.  His operational experiences so far convinced him that any dangers from lung cancer were a generation away from those which daily threatened his life.

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, coughed and relaxed, before he looked at the ops board.  Better to have some idea of what was in store during the day, before breakfast.  Embarrassing to have breakfast and lose it in front of mates when you saw the ops board.  Small things affected a man that way, back then. 

A cigarette was a good start to the day.  Years later there would be time for regrets if he was so lucky.

EVERY FRIDAY
John Longhurst

He is old, fat and weather beaten. His knees are strapped and he cannot bend. His clothing is tattered, nondescript and likely rejected from the local Saint Vincent de Paul shop.

Every Friday he is there. On the corner. In this quaint town where almost everyone else is travelling through to the coast or to the capital city.

His age bridges the millennium but most of it was lived last century.

He sits amongst his produce, on that same corner every Friday, as reliable as the chill wind turns up collars.

Buckets of rocket peppery on the tongue, bunched red radishes like baubles for a bush Christmas tree, cauliflowers fat and white sit brain like on the table and spinach promising boring goodness.

His health and decline over the years is in marked contrast to the produce he sells bursting with vitality.

Every Friday I have the same thought.

Will I end up looking like this bloke if I keep buying his fruit and veg?

Every Friday I have to bend to get the rocket from the bucket as his knees are crook.

And then every Friday I wait.

And wait.

He finishes the conversation with the old woman in front of me a number of times. They say goodbye a number of times and say ‘hang on’ a number of times, and only then, like a very slow barn dance, he turns for my patronage.

I wait. 

Thankfully, we don’t know each other well enough to chat yet, so the transaction is conducted on a reduced dose of Mogadon.

But still he fumbles around in his pocket for his mobile phone for the eftpos app. He adjusts his glasses. He gets out a pen and paper to add up the bill which is pointless anyway because he always says ‘What do you reckon?…… ahhhh…. just make it ten dollars.’

I give him my card. He turns it around whilst simultaneously trying to punch the amount into the mobile phone. He usually drops either the card or the mobile phone and we start again.

Every Friday.

‘Bloody good these things eh?’ and we both look at his phone. ‘Makes things quick eh?’

Every bloody Friday.

THE DINGO
Judy Turner

The solitary dingo zig-zagged silently up the side of the escarpment. Swift and sure-footed. His keen senses detect likely food sources and moisture along the way. He’d travelled far the past six days, away from men with guns and monstrous machines that thundered and plundered, killing his mate, and scattering his pack.

At dusk, he reached the top of the escarpment and stood there camouflaged amongst the red rocks. He lifted his head and howled.

The old man flipped the top off the stubbie with a calloused, arthritic thumb and took a deep swig of the cold liquid. He allowed himself one beer at the end of each long day of patching fences and hand feeding the few cattle left on his drought-stricken property.  He savoured those few moments of respite as he sat on his veranda and watched the sun set over the escarpment.

Movement in a nearby paddock caught his eye. A mob of kangaroos had moved in, stripping any remaining feed from the parched land. Land sucked dry by relentless drought. ‘And it’s sucked me dry too,’ he mused, as he took another swig of beer. He felt tired and alone, his wife long dead, his only son in a faraway city. Even old Bluey had died last month.

Bluey would have sent those roos packing.

 It seemed strange not to have a dog at his feet. But no dog could replace old Bluey, and the thought of training a new pup made him bone weary.

As he watched the setting sun play its symphony of colours against the escarpment, he wondered at first if his ears were playing tricks on him. But no, it wasn’t a dog, but the unmistakable sound of a dingo howling.  A dismal sound, the old man thought, echoing his own feelings of desperation and despair. He went and took his rifle from the rack. Made sure it was clean and loaded.

The next day, he was mending a fence when he saw a flash of golden yellow.  Minutes later, he looked up to see the dingo a few metres away, the trim, muscular body confident and aloof, paws planted solidly on the sun-baked earth.  The man froze. His rifle was out of reach in the Ute, and he was aware any sudden movement could spook the animal.  Then the dingo turned and vanished. The old man puffed his cheeks as he straightened his back, a little breathless and impressed by the beauty of the animal—its composure and the silent, almost magical way it had appeared and then disappeared.

He told his son about it during their weekly phone call. ‘That’s great, Dad. He’ll help restore the natural ecosystem around the place.’

‘I remember my grandfather shooting dingoes when I was a boy.   Been none here since then.’

‘Promise me you won’t shoot this one, Dad.’

Afterwards, the old man found the black-and-white photo of his grandfather standing in front of five pelts hanging on a fence.  He remembered the event well.  And the years when the property sustained large numbers of cattle. When he worked with his grandfather and father and the two stockmen they employed.   But no more!  Now the land lay barren from drought, and his son was urging him to turn their property into a conservation zone before the miners could move in.

 Weeks passed. The roos disappeared, and the dingo was smart enough to stay away from the cattle. 

‘Where’s your pack then, mate?’ the old man muttered as he and the dingo stood eyeing each other off during one of their daily encounters. The man sensed that the animal deliberately sought him out each day. ‘Are you as lonely as me, eh?’ the old man asked. He knew the aborigines once raised dingo pups and trained them to hunt, but he sensed that this proud, independent animal would never be tamed.  Each evening, as he sipped his beer and heard the dingo howl, the old man felt a strange sense of comfort.

The dingo stood at the top of the escarpment, satisfied that this could be a safe place to stay. He’d found enough small mammals, birds, and lizards amongst the rocks for food, and so far, the man seemed no threat.

No dingo answered his evening call, but he’d found signs that his kind had been there once. He settled to sleep, his companions the spirits of dingoes who had hunted there before him, beneath a sky awash with dreams and brilliant stars.

High-rise walk to happiness
Suzanne Newnham

Synopsis: One hot summer afternoon, all it took was a left turn and the wrong footwear to change the course of destiny.

My date stood in the open doorway. A figure of grey-green monotone bush shirt, baggy shorts, hiking boots with socks pushed down concealing the top laces greeted me with a “hi”.
His attire should have given me a clue that this was to be no ordinary outing. Well, not the type that I had been fantasising about for the past week – a darkened movie theatre perhaps or our eyes meeting over a cup of coffee and melting into conversation that only an innocent teenager could imagine.

Slinging a handbag over my shoulder and before my parents had a chance of making comment about his appearance, I ushered the young man, who I met months ago, down the stairs.
“See you later Mum, Dad” I yelled behind me.
I know my parents. Well-tailored clothing with a blazer is the minimum acceptable outfit to be seen accompanying their daughter! Even so, my heart leapt with indescribable joy. “Not to worry, I can change the way he dresses”, flitted across my mind.

Neighbours’ curtains flicker. Questions will be asked about the mode of transport I was getting into – a yellow panel van! I would learn this type of vehicle had numerous nicknames that would send my Catholic school-girl face blushing.

I breathed a sigh of relief and settled into the front seat as the van ambled sedately through the local streets.

“Where are we going?”
His face lit up with a huge boyish grin, “you’ll see.”

All was going well until we turned left, instead of right towards the City cinemas, coffee-shops, and other places one goes on a first date.

“Where are we going?”
He seemed focussed on the bends in the road; the wind whistled through semi-open windows.

“Here we are – isn’t it beautiful?”

All I could see were trees and a river.
“Why didn’t you tell me we were coming here. I could have dressed more appropriately.”

“I don’t judge people by what they choose to wear – you seemed comfortable.”

I tested the dirt for some solidity and stepped out of the car, teetering on the rough ground. My hip-length hair just about covered the micro-mini skirt that now seemed all too short for rambling over the countryside. But it was the 3-inch platform shoes with a 6-inch heel that was the cause of my concern!
“I can’t possibly walk in these”, I tried not to wail.
His outstretched hand I took into mine, accepted his arm around my waist, while my skyscraper-shod feet barely touched the ground as he whisked me into the magical intoxicating world of eucalypts and the Australian bush.

Forty-five years have passed since that bushwalk, and even though we married, I have never changed him. He still dresses the same, although, for me, short skirts have given way to long.

And the shoes? Well, a couple of decades afterwards they were featured in a ‘1970s retrospective’ exhibition at the Australian National Gallery – minus the dirt and dust of that happy day.

© Suzanne Newnham 7 December 2015 published ABC Open; 20 Jan 2023 version 2 for Eurobodalla Writers 
https://suzanne-newnham.com

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Background to the short story Still Point  © Ross Meredith Pascoe 2017

Find an emotion in this extract from TS Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ and write to it –
At the still point of the turning world,
Neither flesh nor fleshless
There the dance lies
Do not ask me where I’ve been
I only know I’ve been there, at the still point.’

STILL POINT

At the still point, you say. When all that binds the heart are severed, then
there is stillness, then there is immortality. To accommodate this need to return
to the best of memory is not stillness. It’s the mind folding under the weight of
change. In truth, too much change across a single life is toxic and so we embed
ourselves in objects to hold the essence of who we have been. Objects retain
meaning.
Oh, Thomas, T S, Mr Eliot, we are vessels of time, the poet more than
any flies closest to the candle’s flame. Makes of himself a hollow reed that
every humanness will enter through and fix upon his soul, born as we are in a
questionable state. WHY, coursing through the entrails. Stirring in the bowel
of our discontent since Eden cast us out. Fluxing flesh and thought into the
immortality of the poet’s holy word.
WHY, has you, sir. You have made challenge to it. Yours is still the age
when people contemplate so very much and the poet, sir, the poet is a voice of
great and mighty reckoning.
Have I said too much? I do ramble once I’m off and running, sir. We are
talking about you, Thomas, T S, Mr Eliot. Picking a barnacle from the
leviathan of your work and pretending we might find a flake of your mind.
Writing about an emotion we hope to glean from your eternal state. I have
discovered wistfulness me thinks in the beauty of your words.
I do love this poem, Thomas, T S, Mr Eliot. I know a much loved country house burnt down, Mr Eliot. Burnt Norton, Mr Eliot. I know you were very attached. But it is you who freed me from attachment by releasing time. This abstraction in which all there was and all there will be dwell in a single state, in a perfect unity. The universal order of God.
I believe I have detected wistfulness, sir. Its cause is this certain advanced age upon which you enter and those thunderheads of approaching modernity. Modernity is not for you. You would arrest time yet it is upon us.
No respecter of any man, it lays the many little deaths over the self before the
big one, sir, the final breath.
As players in this Shakespearian drama, sir.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
We must rehearse you see, and so the little deaths must dull the keenness
of the eye, remove the urge to be a man, if I may be so bold? It gathers beauty
and returns decay. It robs one of all he has loved, and leaves a shadow. Like
those poor dears who were evaporated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sir. They
were people but now they are novelties for the tourists. How wonderful the age
that a human can be evaporated. Perhaps they have found this still point of
which you write so very beautifully?
I can’t except it, sir. I’m sorry to say, there is no, still point of the
turning world. The old get older. The dead are dead a little longer. Even now
change is brewing as we speak across an age. The maelstrom casts its pall and
the still point is but a memory and the little deaths will take all from us before
we are done, sir.
But your poetry, Thomas, T S, Mr Eliot. Your sublime poetry has in its
way stilled time, hasn’t it? You are long dead but in my little writers group we
search for you.
Reflection does present a passing stillness, these precious moments. It is
our human way, this age of reflection we enter, the summing up as we gather the lint of our lives. No intention meant that memory and temporal existence be devalued, they present us with moments of greatest beauty. Lead us on our wistful way, the melancholy journey. If God were not real we would surely have to invent Him in this stage of life just to make it bearable.
I must concentrate on the task at hand. We writers tend to waffle
somewhat. We tend to come at the solution from roundabout ways. It may be
this artistic bent that . . . Yes, yes, wistfulness, my apology.
I sensed the sweetness contained a bitter aftertaste for this life you have
lived gone through. All poets are unhappy, sir. The more so the greater the
poet. What better vehicle to present the foibles of life. The loved and lost.
Setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living.
You were such a feeble boy. America far too wild and unsophisticated
after Emerson and Longfellow for you. That Walt Withman fellow following
the garden path, pansies in hand, meandering to realism.
England, what? I say, cup of tea, what? Cucumber sandwiches, what?
The English are a sad lot. Not terribly robust. The dampness and the ghosts of
plague still secreted in the timber and stone of their living now. They know
how to suffer well. They know their place and not to grumble about the royal
buffoonery. It was a grand idea to become British and live amidst the dusted
vaults for they seep the misery one requires to be a really grand poet and you
are.
Towards the end we are all defeated. It is only natural that you filled
your verse with the allegory of the Book. The Eden of the mother’s breast. The
Eden of the blush of first love lost. The Eden of the fathering of new life
grown beyond the mighty rooted oak. Why would you not then seek the still
centre and the flesh and fleshless dwelling of the mind when we are cast out
from so many Edens?
One wonders for the self so much as for the poet with this task they have
set me, because we share a common fate. This wistfulness comes in upon the
shore a fog of all that’s been and gone. The essence of what was in misty curls around our feet and we are left to ponder much the cruelty and the sublime state of being.
I too am wistful, Thomas, T S, Mr Eliot.

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© Ross Meredith Pascoe 2017

This work is protected by the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission.