In-between-time
There’s a hush
as the sun slips lower
the stillness of long shadows
in half-light we wait
for the boatman’s wherry,
a copper coin gripped in your
fist.
Yesterday, we rambled
between towering eucalypts
to the clearing where smoke
spirals
upward in lazy coils.
Today thin-birdsong fills the
space.
Your breath slows, my hand on
yours
beneath starched white sheets.
Can you hear the creek
rattling over rocks
becoming louder, speeding
round the bend.
Day is settling and night is
yet to begin.
Lost in the City
From the rise
the city’s glow spreads up
illuminating the darkness
a beacon, tugs this outback
refugee
fuels imagined opportunities.
How could I know:
the crush of others like me
where hope is swallowed
in a neon fog.
I sit under my bodhi tree
of ever-changing traffic
lights:
worn cap beside a scrawled
sign
kangaroo tracks far behind.
Is that a magpie carolling…
Forest music summons me with chords passed down
from the beginning. Through dappling canopy
I see a shadow-man wreathed in leaves, cloaked in
sunlight.
His voice joins the wind whispering to wrens and
magpies
strutting around wallabies grazing in a mossy
clearing.
The wind calms. I rest my hand on Gariwerd’s
rock,
and the apparition vanishes. Eroded pebbles rattle at
my feet.
Branches creak overhead weighed down with time.
I search the flickering shadows filled with a loneliness.
Grey-beard monoliths, each season’s cycle a blink in
their lives.
Gariwerd – The Grampians Victoria Australia
Marilyn Humbert lives on Darug and
GuriNgai land in Berowra, NSW Australia. Her tanka and haiku appear in
International and Australian journals, anthologies and online. Her free verse
poems have been awarded prizes in competitions, published in anthologies,
journals and online most recently in Burrow and FemAsia Magazine.
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