What can I give my father, what can I say
To thank the man now he is eighty-five?
He was the one who always had to give.
He gave me life and he was born today.

He looks so small. How little he must weigh.
It is so difficult for him to move,
For me not to seem too much moved. I lived
This helplessly? So close, so far away?

He finds some strength, looks with a knowing smile
On photos of his youth, his motorbike,
Risking his life for thrills mile after mile.
He gave it all up for my mother’s sake.

He rises from his chair. I hold his hand.
Both can still walk if one of us can stand.

I wasn’t brought up to be sentimental and I hope this isn’t. The style is plain, the meaning direct, the affection real.

For us, the lucky ones,
The horror of it lies in metaphor.
A ship that had no guns
Sailing with fervent hopes in search of pleasure
Opened its wrists on cold, hard water
And sank to depths a teardrop cannot measure.

It was unsinkable.
The burst hull berthed against the ocean floor:
Despair repairable?
Relatives of the missing endured too,
Heart-broken, but not any more.
Time, the old captain, pays off every crew.

The band, they say, played on.
We can all take some comfort out of that,
Going but not quite gone:
The journey, not the destination, matters
If mostly all we are is water,
Our conversation just the cold that chatters.

.

Disaster stories always have popular appeal because life itself is a disaster.

Dry, dry, dry as dust!
Goodbye to rain,
Old, fair weather friend
Winds no longer send.
The weather vane
Is seized with rust.

Crack, crack, crack, the grass
Cracks under foot.
Earth, forced apart,
Gapes for an implant, a heart.
Mad gardeners put
In a bypass.

Pale, pale, pale the sky
Rains emptiness
And days shrink under
Nights drained of wonder.
Time to confess
Our sins, throats dry.

.

Drought is a good excuse for minimalist verse! If you try watering the garden, the water just disappears down cracks and boils in hell.

Current draft:

26 August 2015

She lifts from the hill with slow flaps of her wings,
Seeking out heights where the eye alone reigns,
Where nothing sings, no odours ever steal,
The predator prowling round for a meal.

There she dissects the landscape for her prey,
Some hare in a paddock licking its paw.
Cloaked in the mighty shoulders of a swimmer,
She dives down the sky and shatters its summer.

Sometimes I glimpse her while I’m driving past,
Colossal and shabby, perched on a post,
Then in a flash I see how she sees me,
Too big for a hare and gone at high speed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I often see eagles around where I live. There are lots of pastures here and they like to perch on fence posts.