Listen, you wet-behind-antennae crawlers, I’ve flown, I know – it isn’t worth the cost. We’re big, we’re heavy, armour-plated. Hauling all that bulk up in the air – you’ve lost your energy – you could be forced down where you can’t take off again, long grass for instance, or even worse, hard concrete where some […]
PNSpring2008
Farming the Wind
They ride the ridge on tumbling wings, dove-bright, their backdrop the slate-blue sky. Bringers of light, they harness the wind, tug bold on the air with creak-loud sigh. They keep watch, turn on the weather’s whim, guard us, clear-sighted, lumbering, shy.
The Lost Egg of Carretta Carretta
The locals whisper of her nesting site: the golden sands of Kaminia beach. She paddles through dark watery dunes under a moonlit archway, isolated in a historical time warp of flippers, shell and beak-like lips. In the cool of the night-shift, photographers shuffle and watch the slushy breakwater. She appears like a fossilized rock with […]
A Short History of Cooking
A forest fire roasted the first haunch. Someone put two and two together and those who huddled round the hearth at the first ceremonial feast breathed in the fumes of a thousand chippies in that prophetic smoke. While their descendants, sticking plastic forks into their big macs, French fries watch the […]
A Sort of Ark
I’ve had enough of it, with everything here being evicted, poisoned, cut down, trapped, netted, wiped out. We’re off, the lot of us, through a wormhole to somewhere better. Well, not strictly a wormhole – I’ve nothing against worms, some of my best friends are worms, but you can’t get a whale through a […]
About the Olden Days
Tell me how water magnified the surfaces of leaves or skittered off. How it spilled from tiles, gargled along gutters, dropped into echoing butts. How earth absorbed and hoarded it in lightless caves, returned it at springs where women left offerings. Talk about cumulus, cirrus, stratus, and watching thunderheads approach: how light thickened from gold […]