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A tarnished pomegranate warms the chill niche of the windowsill, mottled like a faded kilim, mellow rose, dull gold; the island in the autumn thrums to lyres of the bourini, the pagan tongues of log fires in the chimneys; ancient ferries plying the Aegean in the winter run the gauntlet of the gales like emissaries of reason. It is the lonely season.
The phrase 'the public square' is peppered throughout Frank Brennan's work. The 1988 film Cinema Paradiso depicts the public square in a Sicilian village over 30 or so years, and its slow and subtle change from a place where human beings gather to laugh, play and discuss. Billboards and garish signs appear and it becomes a car park bereft of its humanity.
I can't hate the season entirely. Perhaps winter gives the sun the due reverence it’s owed - a chance for its power to be known intimately through its absence. Over a book, warmed by the words on the page and the cup of tea in your hand, you can muse about what it all means to be alive. Sometimes a little hibernation is what it takes to heal.
Mrs Cowling was formidable. Her significant physical presence was accentuated by a commanding mien, impeccable English enunciation, and an impressive depth and breadth of literary reference supporting rock-firm opinions. All these years later, I wonder just how burdened she was in teaching literature to Australian students, which she continued to do into her 80th year, by her husband's notoriety.
I want to eat a piece of Charlie's fish, speared with a 'dangerous weapon' and coal-charred, in his country. Charlie talked to the fish, 'What a good fish'. Covenant. Better than the white man's supermarket stuff.
WOMAD – World of Music, Arts & Dance – and Adelaide go together in a portmanteau. Amidst the dirt, dust and crowds are moments of connection, transcendence and bliss. The magic happens for all of us in the park: the hippies and the yuppies, the artists and the vollies, the babies and the bats, in different ways and at unexpected times. This four day glimpse of the world as it could be sustains my own soul for a year.
Call me paranoid if you like, but as I walked away, affecting a nonchalant strolling gait, I knew, I just knew, that she was a climate change denier and was daring me to argue the point. Had I hesitated one more moment, I would have been regaled with statistics about the mild coastal summer and other utterly benign climatological phenomena.
How many times rooted are we to earth, though we would reach away from it, lifting our arms like trees? My stem, yielding to the fashioner’s knowing hand? I am not after all ephemeral. No petals of a flower.
When you get home from a bushwalk the forest has infiltrated your clothing, skin, backpack, there is a musty sweetness when I open the cupboard door, a week later, it wafts out and I wait a while to unpick your scent of nature from the fabric of my self.
—trembly bubble of life —raindrop clinging still to cold window glass —illuminated deity —stunning —hosanna on heat —heaven in a melt —earth on its knees beneath serious sun
What they thought could not be read in faces pinched with need. They plodded on, a ragged band of hungry, thirsty refugees, hoping for a crust of bread ... Perhaps tomorrow, there'd be grapes and oranges awaiting them; farmers who would pay in kind for harvesting.
you rattled the night around kitchen tables, water glasses filled with new wine healing history, roses on your cheeks & thunder in your heart