Enterprises begun, projects explored
Selected poems
Recycled
It feels odd to be recycled
My atoms billions of years old
Stretching back millennia
What adventures they have had
Enterprises begun, projects explored
Voyages completed
Gathered now into this organic centre
Of blood and bone
Assembled to be me
Constant in their duty
Always at work
Sending incessantly electronic reassurance
How much I owe them
I do not know where I would be
If they had not paused for this short time
I hear them making plans
Some have already packed their bags
And moved on
But I will always be grateful
Under their guidance
I was able to hold myself together
Pollution
Are stranded whales
Canaries of the sea
Pods beach-cast in despair
Their life-habitat now deadly
Encountering a rainbow parrot
Dead upon the path
I looked for its assassin
Only polluted air
The slow dying of our Village emblem
The growling grass frog
Is sign of the fading health
Of our beloved wetlands
As if sea, land and air
Are succumbing to our greed
New Delhi prepares for winter
School children in class breathe through face masks
Pen
It is audacious
To throw out of the cupboard
That which is old
In preference for the new
And foolhardy
Old and new belong together
Lean on the need to touch
Both then and now
For balance
I am not convinced
Shininess and gigabites
Generate thought
I write this poem
With a pen
Bicycle
No one forgets how to ride a bicycle
Gripping the handlebars comes easily
Slipping onto the seat
Feet unerringly finding the pedals
The first gut wrenching effort
To get inert wheels moving
Riding over the rutted surface
Of a dirt road outside my son’s house
On my grandson’s bike
I raise dust of childhood memories
Wheels cracking ice over winter pools
On the frosty ride to school in Bendigo
Sweaty and hot, pushing up McIvor Road hill
Out to get dry scrub for Bonfire night
Potatoes raked out of the dying coals
Jet black
To be split open, butter and salt added
To burn too eager lips and tongue
The front wheel hanging still on
The designated hook in the undercroft
Of the boy’s bicycle shed at High School
Foreshadowing the stillness
Of a final resting place long forgotten
In the mists of time
Now with the wind in my face
Sparkles flying from glinting spokes
Pursued by remembered shouts
Of teenage enthusiasm
At eighty-one, caution thrown to the wind
I hurtle downhill once again with uncertain brakes
Essence
There is little to be said in the end
Since that which matters
Transcends knowledge
It is difficult to accept
That not knowing
Is the true gift
How hard to learn
That all we secure
Will mist-like drift away
What will remain
Cannot be banked
For love is priceless
We are left without understanding
As an act of mercy
That we might understand
Denham Grierson is the author of Walking on Bones: Poems in the nick of Time.
Main image: Southern lights (A. Sparrow/Flickr)