Juliet Paine
I remember us
This afternoon
the sunlight is hard and coarse
the clouds try desperately
to blot it out.
The mourners are subdued
as a rock concert crowd
at the beginning
of the saddest song.
Each person
brings a flower:
a shortened life
like the girl
in the white coffin.
Well-meant words
fly aimlessly
as pretty butterflies
around the family.
A father stands,
he's a teddy bear
that's lost its favourite child.
A mother cries distraught
- an abandoned china doll
in paradise.
And finally a son
who can't keep wicket
to his sister anymore.
Their grief is as stubborn
as that hard sunlight
which reaches the ground today.
Fishing for Sleep
Sleep eddies in this weather,
a difficult fish to catch.
A shoal of silver dreams swim past
but don't catch on anxious hooks.
There's a blood red grin of numbers
on the alarm clock:
a shark feeding on time and sleep.
A fishing rod stirs the ocean,
gumboot colored eyes and tension
- waiting for a tug at the line.
Journal Poem (Sad)
I drive to the sea.
Thinking of John Berryman,
Jeff Buckley, Virginia Woolf.
What is it about water?
Today has wrung
everything
out of me.
The sea is surreal
blue - unbroken by
houses and roads.
In summer, I only
have a plastic sea breeze
blowing in through
the air-cooler
and the constant rush
of cars in streets
race like waves
to home shores.
At night
when I can't sleep,
white horses pant
at the edge of
beaches and sunsets.
But in suburbia,
I have to make do
with low volume radio static,
the electric sound of ocean wash.
Today I'm here,
soothed with the ease
of a blue valium on
my eye's tongue.
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