Birds are awake
Dawn does not break in silence
What do you expect
Yesterday had been a day when you sweated standing still. Today the August storms arrived ten days early. Palms dipped and swayed close to parallel with the ground. Shallow roots held as the rain had not yet softened the sun-charred earth.
Vito looked up from his cards and wrinkled his nose: it will all be past in half an hour. The far horizon was lightening. Thunder was far away above the sea.
The cicadas were silent. A single bird sang. It could have been warning, it could have been sorrow but it sounded of triumph. And now the sky was close to half clear and the rain had stopped. Shorter, weaker gusts of wind switched the olive trees from green to silver to green again. They shone in the reappearing sun.
Vito looked up again. What do you expect, he said. It is summer. There are strangers. What do you expect.
Scirocco
from southeast horizon no air stirs
on the darkest sea clouds foam
thin cotton clings to skin
thoughts refuse to fly
I forgot your birthday
Two years ago,
after twenty,
I forgot your birthday
but
remembered in the evening
when there were candles on a cake for a different purpose.
This year though, this year.
Yesterday I could not recall the date. After twenty two years.
Perhaps it would be tomorrow
or perhaps two days before.
Of course it is, of course.
It’s today and always will be, as it has been for ninety five years,
even for the last twenty two.
It’s today.
Of course it is.
Happy birthday mum.
There will be cake.
Today has been
Today has been a day of swings from yins to roundabout yangs. Some favourite things – sunshine, watermelon, friendship – and others not so tip top: wind skipping up sand, warm water and jellyfish in the shallows. But when the rain came and there was one umbrella for all of us, how many could take shelter? All of us, of course, because that is always the answer. All of us, together. All of us.
Early morning flight
I fall asleep, head in hand, elbow perched on armrest
then bounce awake
my cheek buffeted by the cheek of a passing steward
pulling behind him a hot and cold beverage trolley
silence then crickets
silence then crickets
wild fennel heads stripped from stalks
sunfall; empty thoughts
Clouds in the sky
clouds in the sky
cloud my mind
clear tomorrow
The first hands
The first hands to touch me were a woman’s, a midwife’s. Then my mother’s.
Years later after good and bad and right and wrong the touch I had always needed and waited for finally arrived.
Now the thought of your touch still sparks the stars beneath my skin. The stars still spark.
Siesta sound
crickets
endless crickets
palm leaves sweeping balcony walls
from the kitchen the moka gargles
simonsalento 