Capturing the sun

The sun is warm on my front,
and the shade is cold on my back,
as I sit on the patio at noon, early in spring,
looking in my window.
Late yesterday, the sun not yet set,
but gone behind a veil,
I stood at that window,
looking out on this patio,
the ferns and leaves a world,
a still green deep, of submerged rainforest light.

I'm eating capeseed bread,
with jam I made from green West Indian limes
grown in this garden, and golden pepinos
striped purple, grown on this patio,
both capturing the sun all thru winter.
Now the winter sun has set
in my home-grown marmalade.

Looking in my window, I wonder
what kind of man lives and works there?
Mostly sunless, I believe.
Yet lit by fires of suns set many aeons gone,
in the time of dinosaurs.
Would he sit on this patio
and wonder?

I eat the winter sun,
and, needy as a lizard,
soak up, on my scaly skin,
the scanty warmth of spring.

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(c) Yahya
29 September 2004
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A poet's dictionary

A melisma in melody
is a long drawn out
flourish, sigh or exclamation;
a whole exhalation
of the soul.

Beauty is far
too chaste a term
to encompass lust;
too plain
to surround wonder;
too straight
to capture
the perfect proportions
of strangeness;
and yet it must.

Weird is me waking
at two in the morning
to write these words
in the darkness
so I'm not breaking
the pattern of your breathing:
ragged, shuddering, shaking
snores;
each one, a weird, melismatic beauty.

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(c) Yahya
19 October 2004
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First post

Wonder how that sounds? They always used to play "The Last Post" when we gathered for the dawn service on ANZAC Day, and also when burying an old Digger. This is probably a bit more like "Reveille" - a wake-up call!