Australia-1

King Parrot

Crimson  Rosella

Galah

haiku

in midday light, skunk

and five pups with tails high throw

caution to the wind

Messenger from the Gods

Messenger from the Gods

     Quetzal, Quetzal, springtime bright,
     Dressed in green and red and white
     That’s iridescent in the light
     Of morning at a mountain’s height.

     Resplendent Quetzal flying free
     Perched upon a feathery tree
     Bedecked with ferns and mossy lace,
     A forest with a different face.

     Endangered Quetzal posed so proud
     Disappearing in a cloud
     That harbors a fertile midday mist—
     A ghost no more while we insist.

     (quetzal = ket-'sȁl)

Rainbow Connection

A Modern Myth

Where do colors come from?

We’ve all seen a rainbow, how beautiful it is.  It has every color we can imagine, except perhaps one—black.  Black is not a color, not really.  We never see color at night.  Not on a dark night when all that we can see are shadows.  There is no color.  There is no color in black.  And there is a reason for that.  The Cloud Maiden knows.

Cloud Maiden is a self-centered young woman.  Sometimes in winter, she gets cold.  She shivers and her teeth chatter because Old Man Sun doesn’t warm her like he should.  She thinks that she can warm things up by throwing a blanket of snow over everything.

Sometimes in spring, she gets angry because Old Man Sun doesn’t warm her fast enough.  She screams thunder and spits lightning and cries big tears in her frustration.  She has scary temper tantrums.

In summer she teases Old Man Sun.  She usually catches him when he wakes up in the morning or goes to sleep at night.  She shakes like a wet dog and sprays rain drops at him. Her spray creates a rainbow, a pretty rainbow for all to enjoy.

But Old Man Sun is usually yawning when he’s waking up or falling asleep. He sucks the rainbow deep inside of him.  When he swallows a rainbow, he always gets the hiccups.  Each time he hiccups, a puff of color comes out.  He hiccups different colors again and again and again.

Those colors fall down in different places.  Some color the flowers.  Some color the berries.  Some color the pretty stones in a necklace.  That’s why the colors of things are so bright and beautiful after you’ve seen a rainbow.  Old Man Sun is coloring them with bits and pieces of Cloud Maiden’s rainbows.

At night after dark when Old Man Sun sleeps, he is no longer hiccuping so he isn’t coloring things.

The colors in my paints here?  Why they come from the same place.  People in far away places take the colors out of those lovely flowers and pretty stones that Old Man Sun has colored with the Cloud Maiden’s rainbows.  And they put those colors in these jars and tubes so that I can use them to paint pictures—and what beautiful pictures they become.

Tonight though, the pictures will be black until Old Man Sun hiccups again in the morning.

Frozen Breath

Exhaling clouds into winter’s trance,
Squinting though the frost at bright sunlight,
A tiny woman leans against her cane
With frigid fingers too stiff to move as she
Shuffles to a stop—just a pause.

Wearing a frayed old coat with hem detached,
Her frizzy white hair fringing a stocking cap,
She watches laughing children build a fort—
Protection from a snowman with broomstick
Arms, a drooping cucumber nose, and a staff.

A frenzied turmoil erupts as children look
For a missing boot beneath their fort
Falling down as they searched for what could not
Be found amid a wall—the boot had become
Home plate for the snowman’s staff, a baseball bat.

Her knitted gloves with dangling threads possess
Little grip as she fumbles with the snow
Beside the trampled walkway and tries to make
A softball to strike the snowman out while in
those few moments she is back on fields of play.

Crossing

It’s follow-the-leader,
the name of a game of thousands at a time.
In a wave, these wildebeests charge across
a beach of cropped savanna grasses toward
a perilous toil.

A froth of horns
atop this bestial wave flows out of
an acacia woodland and down toward a ramp
between boulders along an embankment of
the Mara River.

The leaders balk—
stopping there to search for courage to brave
swift currents, hungry crocodiles,
and bloated carcasses of kin killed during
prior crossings.

Assorted vehicles
line up to jockey for position, some blocking
the far-side ramps where the herd would climb
out of the water to escape the river's perils.
One wildebeest jumps.

Chaos then splashes
into the boulder-strewn river as wildebeests
attempt to follow one another across.
Currents push the bodies downstream so
their course bows.

Some vehicles move,
open a space where successful swimmers
can climb out of the river and up toward
fields of lush grasses, a feast all the way to
the calving grounds.

Another leader
chooses a different ramp down to the water’s
edge.  Lines merge.  Then a third track opens,
and three lines mingle.  Swimming heads and horns
become a mob.

More than once,
jumpers land on swimmers, water cushioning
the blows.  One looses her footing on a wet
ramp, dives in upside down.  She rights
herself unharmed.

Some turn away
opting to cross another day.  Splitting
the wave, they return to the cropped field.  A yearling
hesitates not knowing which direction
her mother went.

Last to cross,
this youngster was neither leader nor follower, but
a solo artist willing to risk injury or death
crossing the mad Mara River during the Great
Migration.

Her Wheelchair

One hot day, I was driving through a factory town when I saw a woman in an oncoming lane pushing a wheelchair.  She probably had detoured into the four-lane street because the sidewalk was being repaired. The wheelchair was empty, but she had a walking cast on one foot.  She was hobbling along as traffic swung wide around her.

Squinting in the midday sun, her face seemed to be all nose.  Her hair was an unnatural black ratted into a wasp net which listed to one side as though it were melting from the heat.  Too old and too overweight to wear tight-fitting knit shirts and shorts, nevertheless she was dressed in them.

Was she fighting the indignities of old age with dyed hair and girlish clothes?  Or was she fighting old age with all the dignity she could muster?

It strikes me that many of us have wheelchairs where we sit and wait for someone to push us around.  Some of us though, like this old lady, get behind our chairs and push ourselves in the directions we want to go.

I learned later that this lady and her empty wheelchair had been seen shopping in stores.  Sometimes there was an old-fashioned boom-box in the chair blaring away.  Sometimes she talked to an imaginary somebody sitting there.  A parent?  A spouse?  A child?

I guess pushing a seemingly vacant wheelchair in the middle of traffic is something you can do if you are off balance.