Poetry

Hospitality; a reflection by Colleen Keating

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Hospitality: A reflection

Oak of Mamre (Rublev icon)

Hospitality

This is a Russian Icon that I have loved for many years. it has always been a  a centre piece in our home  near the entrance. It speaks to me of hospitaity.  Officially it is called the Oak of Mamre .  A Rublev  icon it is full of symbolism using the Holy Trinity which at his time was the embodiment of unity, peace, harmony, mutual love and humility.  

The icon is based on a story from the Book of Genesis called Abraham and Sarah’s Hospitality or The Hospitality of Abraham (§18). It says that the biblical Patriarch Abraham ‘was sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day’ by the Oak of Mamre and saw three men standing in front of him, who in the next chapter were revealed as angels. ‘When he saw them, Abraham ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth.’ Abraham ordered a servant-boy to prepare a choice calf, and set curds, milk and the calf before them, waiting on them, under a tree, as they ate (Genesis 18:1–8). One of the angels told Abraham that Sarah would soon give birth to a son.

 

 

 

 

Rumi’s mystical poetry often helps me regain perspective on life. In this poem, I love his notion that being human is like being a “guest house.” Unexpected visitors occasionally show up and stay for a while, including some you’d really like to throw out!

Welcoming them and learning what they may have to teach you, or where they may lead you, isn’t always easy. But in my experience, it always pays off — if for no other reason than it hastens the day of their departure!

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

 

I believe practicing hospitality towards the other is key to restoring the civil community
on which democracy  depends. It means finally coming to the realisation there is no other. we are all one , depending on each othere on this small ship of earth .  Hospitlity doesnt mean agreeing with everything

It means listening openly and with respect learning how to build bridges rather than walls. 

Each of us is a “guest house” Our first job is to be good hosts to ourselves , good hosts to each other and out wider and wider.  “Be grateful for whoever comes our way/ for each comes to us / as a guide from beyond.”  Rumi

      

Drawing Sister Mary Brady OP

We have to question our Hospitality as a country when we have reminders of cartoon as those above.  And today with the Rivers of Humanity we see each night on our television we have to wonder how can we be present to this  and what can we do to heal our broken world.? These are the questions we have to humbly grapple with  as a caring person on this planet. 

Prayer for  this Broken World.

Into this world

this demented inn

in which there is  no room for him,

Christ has come ininvited.

His place is with those others

for whom there is no room –

those who do not belong

those who are rejected

who are denied the status of persons

who are tortured, bombed, exterminated.

Thomas Merton.   1965 A modern mystic. 

 

And in this world today I like his final prayer written in New York  in about 1985

 

Another drawing to remind us to work always to build bridges not walls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Komorebi: Sunshine filtering through trees by Colleen Keating

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When I took these photos in the Edna Hunt Sanctuary in Eastwood Sydney NSW while on an early morning walk with Millie (yes I am pleased Millie is there standing with me mesmerised. This was an epiphanic moment for me at the time in 2012  .  I actually stood in  it and it was like the ephemeral thing of  grace falling all around me.  I had to go back and retrieve these photos  to share here on my blog as I had a new experience this morning The story is below .

Komorebi (木漏れ日): Sunshine filtering through the trees

The cello’s dappled flow, with  the guitars sharp strings of light-fall, in the new music by Alisha Redmond  played on the ABC this morning caught my attention for further study. It was titled Komorebi. I googled the word only to find it is  a Japanese word  coined to describe that light that shimmers through leaves and plays its music too on the footfall of your bush track swaying rhythm to the whim of wind at the time. 

There isn’t really an English  word equivalent: we speak of dappled, filtered, light. Spiritually we can speak of our connection with nature, symbolising a harmony that can inspire feeling of awes, tranquility, and sublime beauty. The sight of Komorebi – the dappled sunlight, the shifting shadows, and the leaves aglow with the radiant light – is something that resonates deeply with me. Once walking with Millie in the Sanctuary I  used to live near  the experience of komorebi  was like an epiphany for me at a certain time in my life. 

I googled the word Komorebi to find it defined as

Komorebi 木漏れ日 (pronounced kō-mō-leh-bē) Literally, “sunlight leaking through trees”  this word describes the beauty and wonder of rays of light dappling through overhead leaves, casting dancing shadows on the forest floor.

Another definition states, Japanese term “Komorebi”, for which no simple English translation exists. Yet it is a distinct phenomenon, that anyone who spends time among trees will have enjoyed. roughly translates as “the scattered light that filters through when sunlight shines through trees”. It is made up of three “Kanji” or Chinese characters: “tree” or “trees”, “leaking-through” or “escape”, and “light” or “sun”.

Thank goodness for google for then I met  an  Arboriculturist  on a site called AWA and he becomes poetic doing the research I was going to do as he writes:

Komorebi is especially noticeable when the sun is low, and mist or smoke can add to the effect. The impact of Komorebi to the observer can range from creating a pleasant ambiance for a walk through the woods, to generating feelings of awe – which in the right place at the right time – verges on the transcendental. As an arboricultural consultant, I spend more time than most looking at trees when undertaking tree surveys for planning, and occasional experiences of Komorebi have caught me unaware, and have momentarily transformed the most uninspiring trees in development sites, into something special.

Less technical and more poetical attempts have been made in the English language to capture the event. Without a suitable term, several poets and authors felt compelled to invent their own words:

Dylan Thomas called it “windfall light”, in his poem “Fern Hill”, writing:

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins created the term “shivelight” for: “the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood”’.

The author C.S. Lewis was a fan of these “shafts of delicious sunlight” or “Godlight”, writing: “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are patches of Godlight in the woods of our experience.”

Despite their efforts, none of these words have caught on.

Komorebi, like several similar terms, highlights the influence of nature and aesthetics that is unique to Japanese culture. 

Perhaps, beyond poets and physicists, there is no need for an English equivalent. The experience – of observing sunlight through trees – might be enough. Indeed, the absence of a comparable word allows respite from the taxonomic rumination that occurs in most other aspects of life, helping Komorebi remain as one of life’s “pure and spontaneous pleasures”.  https://colleenkeatingpoet.com/5925-2/

Adam Winson (Chartered Arboriculturist,)   Photos: Lars van de Goor

The New Year Welcome 2025

colleen Poetry

 New Year – 2025

A new chance at beginnings
like a path of snow without a footprint or a sandy beach with out  a track
not even from  the seagull or crab. 
It is a calendar without a crossed day. 

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us,
new, untouched, full of things that have never been . . .” – Rainer Maria Rilke

So we gather on the eve and wait for the clock to turn over  . . . .  and for one breath we stand.

How long that breath, that moment, that day , only we know.

And then at the next beat in this fast moving, loud and in-your-face world, with all its tensions,
we walk  alone over the sacred uneasy threshold , into where we are overwhelmed
once again with the work that needs to be done, in  our relationships, our families and our world. 

How long we make that one moment is what in some terms is called statio

Statio is “an ancient mystical practice of pausing intentionally in the in-between to create sacred space.

Statio is the pause that makes a threshold, a moment both of waiting and readiness.
It invites us to cultivate hope, courage and resilience by resting right there in the gap,
to find strength in stillness, to gather ourselves in this space between breaths,
even when exhaustion and doubt tempt us towards fear.” from Waymakers.

For me  this 2025  first dawn drew me to set out along the beach near our small get-away on the Central Coast of NSW,  to take in the sunrise of the new year. 
But it was the surprise  of a family of fairy wrens flirting  on my paths and in the scrub by the way where they flitted about giving me a delightful exhibition of males and females and a fledgling. 

 

In the background, the ocean, the blue sky’s vast embrace and the pelicans gliding at the entrance fishing the outgoing tide. I had to smile at the poor fish they survived life in the lake, probably for months, they survived the journey down the channel with fishermen on both sides of the bank out to lure them and at the last leg just as they make the ocean the line of smart pelicans scoop them up into their huge beak.

We enter the new year with a broken world, burdens of war in many guises, the reality of misinformation, disinformation and  the use of chaos  like a river in turmoil becomes muddy the world stirs fear in people and nations’ minds  and the power of Oligarchs  to set the world’s agenda. The world, now a multicultural village dependents on each other until someone wants more than their fair share and greed shows it ugly head. 

And so we  have work to do and as a Daoist i am reminded;

Check your balance, mind, body and emotion. 
The inner power only comes when you are aligned  as one –
your mind ordered,
your feelings at peace
your body aware
then  the inner power will gradually arise
like the morning sun
into the core of your being. 

Tranquillity in a small piece of the world  at peace Black swans and an egret: 1st January 2025

May 2025 bring the peace most of the world craves, hopes for, works for, prays for, wishes for. so we can live in happy carefree groups and bring up our children without fear.

How lucky in one small space,

along Tuggerah Lake

2 spoonbills, a pelican and a white egret

all feeding in peace

day one of 2025

 

 

 

 

New Year Mystery by Colleen Keating

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New Year Mystery

Black garbage bags, knife and gloves murmur mystery 
as the two of us stride out along the berm of the lake 
past the pelicans fishing the channel on the incoming tide 
past the cormorants, gulls and Little terns at the edge
pause to admire the delicate grey heron in the bull rushes.

It was further along the littoral shore amidst the swamp oaks
where day-trippers, overnighters, drifters had left rubbish –
a place to use our power  to help in the one small way we could.

Yet the day expanded into a bigger mystery. A whimper
from a plump, fluffy kookaburra  alone on the ground caught 
our attention. In the tree tops there was kookaburra mayhem
The chick stayed like a statue until i moved closer and it lifted
of, flapped its way onto a low branch. An hour later on the walk
back, looking more like an orphan, it remained motionless
with more the pose of an owl. There was still noisy agitation
from the large palm, not a kookaburra laugh but a droning call
and  here we were powerless to help.

Colleen Keating

   

Julie Mehretu (A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory) The Experience by Colleen Keating

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Picture above  – The New Dawn

Julie Mehretu

(A transcore of the Radical Imaginatory)

Images crowd our minds, thoughts scramble . . .
This overload of information you use multilayered 
to blot out story, our words, thoughts, judgement  . . .
we are left with the blur  . . .sweeping lines, 
shapes,  stencils, that disrupt and interweave 
within the frame

Where is space 
in this world for the soul?

Shadows mingle on the hanging canvass
each viewer a presence, smudged, smothered,
each of us shading the overlay.  
Image after image is transformed – 
morphs into the abstract

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to roam?.

Images crowd in to be our burden – Californian fires, 
flames, firestorm, Grenfell Tower torching sky- 
humans, ethnic cleansing, Rohingya conflict,
trail of black ash, the Burning Bush  that consumes.
Image after image 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to be free?.

You overlay, overlay to transform. 
Blurred towards abstraction. Each physical event 
experienced and now you remind us this is not us , 
this is not our world. Even as I step close 
in search of a bird, a feather, even wisp of a wing 

Where is space 
in this world for the soul to fly?  

                                                                                                                                               
Before the canvass titled New Dawn I weep.
Darkening, with pace of time, race for information 
what do we know? What have we done? 
Our tiny ones have only a small place 
of gold horizon to be born and spread their wings.

Where is space  
in in this crowded noisy shattered world? 

Is it you who give us the space within, no words 
of containment, no pidgin-holing of our being, no longer
reduced to body, skin, national identity
rather a trajectory for a more complex way
to imagine a better world.  In this motion 
are we on the verge of collapse or the brink of transition?

A space where our soul 
can breathe and love again. 



There are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in.
It’s overwhelming.  . .the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate.
I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate
these complexieites and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place – Julie Mehretu

 

The Magritte Experience by Colleen Keating

colleen Poetry , , , ,

René Magritte

‘There is more than what one knows’  M.

Memories are water, deep, brooding and primal
with eyes closed, seeing  another way

who knows 
who

 The crow perches 
 holds the question

The thought is the image – apple thought, cloud,   grey 
everyman  
brush – paints ideas  . . . reality is senseless 
as is god  

Time folds into itself 
it is all here,   from eternity,  forever  

Familiar is no longer 
as  pipe is not  pipe

the bird perched on top of the cage 
still the question

The dove of the sky  holds the clouds 
with hundreds of other I gaze at gazing

no word . . .  no

My daughter, laid low with a broken ankle 
asks to live vicariously through me 

and seeing it through her eyes is seeing it twice 
doubley asking the question

 

         

Magritte’s trademark images of clouds, seascapes, bowler-hatted men,  pipes, apples. 
Some complained theat his work is anti -painting  – cultivated for its unreality and strangeness.

Surrealist painter and provocateur René Magritte  created some of the  most memorable images of the 20th century.
In a way with his slanted way of seeing he reveals the mystery and poetry embedded within seemingly
ordinary objects and everyday settings.

But will you wake for pity’s sake ! Hope for 2025 Colleen Keating

colleen Poetry ,
FOR 2025

A Sleep of Prisoners — Christopher Fry

The call to awake is one that I relate to.

A SLEEP OF PRISONERS

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul we ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise

Is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake,

But will you wake for pity’s sake!

-Christopher Fry

A Little Book of Japanese Contentments by Erin Nimi Longhurst

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A wonderful find on the last day of 2024.

Some reminders on the  cultural wisdom and practices in achieving

a balanced, peaceful, and fulfilling life.  This is a valuable beginning for 2025.

“A Little Book of Japanese Contentments: Ikigai, Forest Bathing, Wabi-sabi, and More” by “Erin Nimi Longhurst” is an insightful exploration of Japanese concepts that promote well-being and a fulfilling life. The book delves into various traditions and philosophies, such as”*ikigai” (a reason for being), “forest bathing” (immersing oneself in nature), and “wabi-sabi” (appreciating beauty in imperfection). Longhurst blends cultural insights with practical advice, encouraging readers to incorporate these principles into their daily lives to cultivate a sense of peace, contentment, and connection to the world around them.

10 Lessons from “A Little Book of Japanese Contentments”

1. Discover Your Ikigai:
Identify your passion, mission, vocation, and profession to find your unique reason for being that brings joy and fulfillment.

2. Engage in Forest Bathing:
Spend time in nature to reduce stress and enhance mental clarity, allowing the natural world to replenish your spirit.

3. Embrace Wabi-sabi:
Appreciate the beauty of imperfection and transience, recognizing that flaws can add character and depth to life.

4. Practice Mindfulness:
Cultivate present-moment awareness through meditation or simple daily rituals, fostering a deeper connection to your experiences.

5. Nurture Simplicity:
Simplify your life by decluttering both your physical space and mental load, allowing for greater tranquility and focus on what truly matters.

6. Prioritize Relationships:
Invest time in building and maintaining meaningful connections with family and friends, as social bonds contribute significantly to happiness.

7. Celebrate Small Joys:
Find contentment in everyday moments, recognizing that joy can be found in simple pleasures and routine activities.

8. Adopt a Growth Mindset:
Embrace challenges as opportunities for growth and learning, fostering resilience and a positive outlook on life.

9. Connect with Tradition:
Explore Japanese cultural practices and rituals that promote well-being, integrating them into your own life for a sense of grounding.

10. Be Grateful:
Foster an attitude of gratitude by regularly reflecting on the positive aspects of your life, enhancing overall contentment and happiness.

These lessons from “A Little Book of Japanese Contentments” highlight the value of cultural wisdom and practices in achieving a balanced, peaceful, and fulfilling life.

Holiday ramblings, Sonnet style by Colleen Keating December 2024

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Day 1
Indecision  or turning tide

The ocean is a field. The ocean is windy 
wild, kicking, a two year old in tantrum.
The ocean begins to hiss like fired lard.
Waves swirl, twirl, like a mosh pit
of crowded concert goers. Its white plumes
and spindrift ringing the air . They remind me
of your rumpled hair on rising from the bed
uncertain of the day ahead.

Where is the moon, you ask, to parent
the tide? Turmoil is the nemesis of the mind. 
The mind is a field. The mind is windy, 

wild, turning here, turning there. I cannot
help but wish for a moon-god to marshal
your stirrings, directing their erratic flow.

Colleen Keating

 * * * * * * * * * * * 

Day 2.

 

interconnection

She walks out towards the lake 
precariously like a sleepwalker ambles 
when they don’t really want to face the day.
Thick fog steals the horizon. 
Large pines on the other side misted-in
show a ghostly giant command
peering out like Tolkien’s ents.
Her gaze has the gravitas of other worlds.  

How to feel joy in this time of joy? Hildegard’s 
words grooved like an old LP imprint her mind
i cannot break bread except as i am broken.

In the reeds a visiting spoonbill wades, its wide
beak raking the mud .Two pied stilts swoop at it
over and over with barking noise.

Colleen Keating

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Day 3.

Put in our place

The lake is mirrored-calm, still untouched
by morning noise. 
The heat is already building for a summers day.
The visiting spoonbill, not deterred is back.
The black swans silhouetted glide peacefully. 
Plovers are themselves always with a voice
for those who encroach in their territory. 
Under the large pines usually full of roosting 

cormorants all chatting, it is eerily quiet. 
They have flown off for the day. 
Only then do our feet begin to stick to the ground, 
We are are walking like people with lead in their shoes.
We realise they have been busy before they left.  
The result is like a glue, stuck around our sneakers, clotted 
with leaves and dirt.

Colleen Keating

* * * * ** * * * * * * * * 

Day 4.

Pause

An online group I belong to 
ask for a word for 2025. 
All the normal ones light up
like electric bulbs in my head–
gratitude, listen, dream.
I was out walking by the lake
and decided to pause to watch 
a white egret fishes the tidal zone.

Pause. I thought how much more 
it gives me focus. I see its pick-axe
precision and stealthful stepping.  
I see how a caught pilchard wriggles down 
its long neck and I hear wild whispers
of the wind in the swamp oaks 
and to make sense of todays turmoil 
the pause is a purposeful strategy.

Colleen Keating

* * * * * * * * * * * * * 

 

Day 5

Road to Jericho

RIP Michael Leunig  1946 -2024

(Thank you for reminding us of our soul 
and the angels over and over
and  thanks for so often being our conscience. )

it is rough uneven, familiar pot-holes 
no surprise. what shocks more is lack
of safety, the unknown enemy lying low.
So many rustling angels are missed,
Leunig said, in the hurry to get from A to B 
A cry for help would hardly 
be heard over the cicada shrill 
of this hot summers day.

Even as I conduct their bush song 
my hands rise and fall in rhythm 
like the oceans rolling crests and troughs
reaching crescendo of an alleluia chorus 
there are still the troughs and life’s journey
is only as good as staying on the way.

Colleen Keating

While shepherds washed their sock by night
all seated on the ground
the angel of the Lord came down
and no one looked around ML
Just wrote this out till I get a clearer photo of the December calendar.

Our last calendar December cartoon. RIP Michael Leunig and thank –you

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Day 6.

   

Butcher bird  and Magpie enjoying a drink with their  careful nod of thanks.

The Perfect Pact

The bird bath stands in clear view on the terrace
like a set up eco stage for insects to skim, 
wildlife  including the possum passing by 
and birds. We insist like a UN peace treaty
all birds have an equal right and must share
Sharon’s yellow flowered bush adds filtered shade
and a place to perch. the bird bath stands  
like an icon of empathy and sharing.

And it is not one way – we enjoy the whoosh
of wings fanning the air, flamboyant colours
of show off fluttering their feathers and bedazzling us 
the songs they sing in all their varied pitch and tone.
Knowing the pairs now why is it when one is missing 
we feel our own fragility? 

Colleen Keating

* * * * * * * * * * * 

Day 7

 

The dry sandy walk to Karagi Point slows 
like a trek across a desert. At the far edge
the first thing we hear a frenzy of chirps, 
insistent and wild flapping of wings. 
Hundreds of little Terns cloud the sky across
the fenced-in breeding ground.Their flighty 
path of lift-ups and dives with tight turns 
and somersaults more precise than aerogliders. 

Then one darts down to the sand, a dangle 
of food in its beak and the sand comes alive
with beige coloured chicks. 
We stand there mesmerised,
marvelling at the endurance of this migratory
bird. Its tiny heart thrumming against the wind. 

Colleen Keating

 * * * * * * * * * * * 

Bird Talk   on our Normanhurst terrace.

They call me King . Aren’t I gorgeous.?
They don’t seem to mind me perched on their  herbal garden

 

Waiting.   Just playing my cards. Sitting on their clothes line
near their back door means they will see me soo.
I am getting them trained!

We are learning to share here on the terrace.

 

 

 

Two Canticles by Colleen Keating published in Rochford Street Journal Issue 40 2024

colleen Poetry

Rochford Street Review

Issue 40.  2024:2

   

Two Canticles

At a cottage by the sea I tackle Francis Webb, curious about

his poetry from Cap and Bells. Outside a wild spring ocean’s

curled waves tussle on the tide, comb to the edge, like spoonbills

probing every squint of sand and wrack. The horizon

 

is drawn-in, appropriate for this day in this ruptured world.

The sun finds thin spots to break through clouds, blades the sea

with thousands of stars and as quickly is blocked. In his poems

Francis tools words in obscurity and I must wait for the rare 

 

glimmer to shine through, to touch their thousand stars before

they meld into his shadowed world. With torch and compass

I grope through the labours of Hospital Night and wait in the

dark for the sound of winged ones in the swaddled air of his

 

suite Ward Two. I once met a Benedictine nun who knew 

Francis Webb, as an escapee from Parramatta Mental Hospital.

He knocked at her convent back door. Frail, lost, clutching

a book of poetry. Eyes eminently human, beaconed his ragged

 

struggle. His voice garbled: I am not seeking money or food 

but peace. He scribbled out for her his poem Five Days Old.

Then a lonely, derelict figure slouched out the gate. His words

frisk the heroic-journey, explorers’ struggle, like one who holds

 

a shell, turns it over and over for light, shots of colour, as he

tackles the one-journey common to us all. His poems of 

The Canticle echo another Francis who wrote Il Cantico, 

who praised glimpses of brother sun  and sister moon through

 

tender, frayed clouds, who walked barefoot, high-walled Assisi: 

its olive groves, vineyards, lanes, paths of cobbled stone, 

searching too for peace. Falling on his knees, face in his hands

he humbly made himself its instrument, finding the meaning 

 

only in the search. He threw off worldly garb, gold and plumes

donned a court jester’s cap and bells, reverberating touch of 

birdsong his bedrock. Through a darkling glass are two canticles

hundreds of years apart. Each Francis dances on fear’s altar. Both 

 

be fools, taunted, for gnawing life to the bone. Both seeing beauty

in the tiny not the immense. Outside, flocks of sea gulls skim 

the southerly, skate on the edge. I listen to their skirl on the air, 

wayfarers, like the ocean in its unceasing quest. 

Colleen Keating

Winner of the Phillipa Holland Poetry 2024 with Eastwood/Hills FAW (Fellowship of Australian Writers)

———————————–

Colleen Keating is a Sydney poet. Her writing explores the wonder and paradox of nature with the harsh realities of life, justice, equality and the increasing threat to our natural environment. Her poem, Fifth Symphony was recently awarded Highly commended in the Poetic Christi Press poetry competition and published in the new Anthology A New Day Dawns 2024. Colleen has published six collections of poetry, including two award-winning verse novels, Hildegard of Bingen: A poetic journey and Olive Muriel Pink: her radical & idealistic life. Her newly published book is The Dinner Party: A poetic reflection. (2023) All are available through Ginninderra Press. Colleen writes on Ku-ring-gai land in Sydney and Darkinjung on the Central Coast NSW.

Also welcomed to be published by Michael Griffith.author of Cap and Bells

Michael Griffith: Home Page- Literature and Life Spring 2025
Michael Griffith’s Official Literature Site

 

michaelgriffith1
November 7, 2024 at 11:47 am

Hello Colleen, I love this poem! It captures so much of the essence of Francis Webb’s passion and the direction of his own search. In terms of our current poetry sessions – Poetry’s Job- I feel this is a perfect poem for illustrating how poetry here (your poetry and the poetry of the poet you celebrate) give voice to the quest for wholeness in a difficult, tumultous world. Your own beautiful observations of nature carry me back to what we were saying just yesterday about Jane Hirschfield’s recognition that the real source of nourishment for her own search is the immediate:

Can admire with two eyes the mountain

actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

—

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.

Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Thank you Colleen!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

‘Brilliant’ Colleen!   Your writing demonstrates the ache and artistry of Scott Fitzgerald

with your ability to tie the lives of two people together over that vast distance of time. 

I am sure Michael Leunig would have gathered inspiration for one of his works

from your ‘Two Canticles’ if he was still with us. 

Your writing is much deserving of a broader audience.

Congratulations!

Michael Linich  (Dr. Michael Linich Lecturer, Science Education at University of Newcastle NSW. Australia.