Tag: peace

Listening Meditation.

Lucy 
Birds overhead
 and the rain sweeping violently over the roof in sprays
 snatched by the winds and torn away
 then lashed on the rooftops again.
 Birds fly over
 giggling 
 and calling as they pass.
 The cat doesn’t like it.
 Meows
 a startled birdish chirrup
 and jogs over to me.
 In the left ear
 gas burning
 in muted and droning roar.
 To the right
 the rain dashed on the window glass
 spittered
 closer than the swirling roar inside the walls 
 beneath the ceiling.
 Birds call overhead
 again
 these screeching and squarked calls
 bickering as they go.
 Now footsteps 
 in another house’s hallway
 (though there’s nobody home)
 thumping
 they vibrate through the floorboards
 and rumble
 in the floors.
 No voices
 only the birds calling and bickering
 and giggling 
 as they go.

Found in a Notebook, titled ‘Au Printemps. St Kilda Botanical Gardens. A sunny Tuesday.’

Lucy

Para-gliders — five of them — loop across the bright, warm blue sky. The day is cloudless, stirred by a slight, light breeze. How far can they see, from up there? A vast stretch of billowing, bloated mass of inhabited land. The ocean; the ships beyond the horizon. What do they see of me? A small, black splodge; an ant on grass, as insignificant as the winged ant that just now alights upon my scribbling page.

On the subject of insects — there are bees about, hovering peacefully above the clusters of yellow daisy-like blooms that sprout from the grass in ragged patches wilted by the sun. The occasional fly goes by my ear.

Another sky-watcher makes his way across the blue; a light plane, mumbling and growling back and forth, the light shining silver on the white body of the plane.

Sunbathing season has begun. The lawns are littered with girls baring themselves to the warm spring sun, so I am not out of company with my cotton bath-sheet to spread upon the grass. Contented-looking babies are wheeled about the gardens by their mothers.

Distant, high-pitched screams come from above, as another para-glider’s chute opens with a strange crackling roar.

The breeze feels layered; it buffets across my skin in alternating, mingling streams of cool, dry, quick air, and pockets of languorous, humid warmth.