Tag Archives: words

Once Upon a Poem 

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Once, when two persons were walking together at day’s end, the elder of the two remarked on the sunset. He spoke and said:

 

the sky is burning

in my mind

 

Once Upon a Story

 

Once, when two were walking on the beach the younger saw a rock that looked like Leviathan and she said:

 

Last night I was here and that rock wasn’t a rock.

Last night I saw it move from the sea. It moved up the beach and it came towards me. It was a whale. It chased me up the sand and I ran and I ran and I didn’t stop running until I got home.

 

Once Upon a Song

 

Once, when two walked together a song drifted towards them. The song had no words. The sounds of the song reached them from somewhere higher or darker or hidden. The sound surrounded them. The flapping of wings, the whoosh of flight, made them think of birds. And the drift and drone, the rise and fall, the start and pause, mad them think of a breathing. Perhaps a person. Perhaps their planet.
Once and Always

 

The poem and the story and the song came and went, went and came, always different, ever the same. The song and the story and the poem bound the younger to the elder and both of them to all who came after and to all who came before.

 

Sometimes the two remembered or wondered or dreamed or knew: the song and the poem and the story had been there before they were, before the sunset, before the rock. Perhaps song, poem and story had brought the sunset and the rock and the flapping wings into being.

 

The two knew they could exist only in a world of story and poem and song.

 

 

 

He Contaminated the Language

By Posted in Faith, Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , 9 Comments

When he said he groped women, when he said he grabbed them by the pussy, when he said when you are a star you can just go right in and do those things, he fouled the way humans communicate with each other.
 

Our words flow from our bodies, through air, through cyberspace, through waves. They emerge from our embodied minds, they bear our thoughts and our feelings, our fears and joys and dreams. They connect humans as only humans can be connected – unless you include angels that sing hallelujah and God who speaks from a burning bush or a mountain top, or in the wilderness in still, soft voice.

 

Language now lies soiled, tarnished, filthied. Who can use it without tasting that distaste? Who can write of man with woman, of humans with neighbours, of differing colour or creed or country, without feeling estranged from our fellow?

 

He has soiled our prized human heritage of words. He has broken wide the bridged divides. He has strewed our ravines with contempt and vulgarity.

 

He leaves us with dance, perhaps with music. Let us dance now, let us sing without words, let us strum and hum. Let us reach out, let us flail and wail for all whom he’d estrange. Let us bring them in whom he’d drive out. For they are us.

 

Happy Concatenation

By Posted in Family, friendship, Life, Love Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments

Mr Menzies, as he was then, used to report to Parliament upon his return from
The Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. He’d introduce his report with, ’By a happy concatenation of circumstance I happened to find myself in London for the Conference at precisely the time of the Cricket Test Match at Lords…’
I read this in the ‘Age’ newspaper and looked up ’concatenation’. I have kept the word close, generally unused, for the half century since.
 
By a singular concatenation of circumstance, today Jewish people around the world observe Shushan Purim on precisely the date of Good Friday. Yesterday we had the concurrence of Purim with Shrove Thursday; and the previous day the Jewish Fast of Esther coincided with the fast of Ash Wednesday. That’s how calendars concatenate.
 
By a happy concatenation of circumstance, while riding home through the park yesterday I overtook another cyclist, emerging into Commercial Road just as she did. From a long way back I saw first the yellow jacket. Gaining, I noted her tall, erect carriage in the saddle, her fair pony tail, her fair skin. Emerging from the park, with eyes only for the vehicular traffic ahead I had no time to sight her face.
I crossed the road and halted, waiting for the red light to turn. A voice emerged from a blur of yellow: ‘Howard? It is Howard, isn’t it?’ I had time now to take in that fair face, to recognise the features and that voice. A voice of a singular quality, a soft voice, with a sweet self-echo, as of a bell. I knew that voice.
‘Hello, Camilla.’ My voice would have carried surprise and delight.
‘Where are you heading, Howard?’
I indicated.
‘Me too,‘ she said, ‘I’m headed to St Lucy’s to pick up Joe.’
Our ways were the same and we rode together and caught up on the events of ten years: the growth of her son Joe (one of my babies), the decline and deaths of her parents and mine; and the premature loss of a brother, in each case only a little older than ourselves.
 
 
I told Camilla about Dennis. I mentioned the regret, my uncompleted mission, that marked my time with Dennis and that surfaces years after his dying, in my dreams. When I spoke of my brother’s dying Camilla’s face fell. Her voice a deeper bell.
 
‘I lost a brother too. I loved him.’ Camilla’s voice thrilled and her face shone as she spoke of her brother. ‘His name was Tom. He was a twin. He lived to forty-nine then he died. I don’t know what of. He was disabled. I loved him. We spoke on the phone every day. Every single day.’
‘What was his disability, Camilla?’
A smile, a half shrug: ‘Do you know, I can’t say exactly what he had and I don’t know what he died of. I suppose now you’d call it cerebral palsy. He was born with it. He was just my brother and we loved each other. We were together every day as children, back in the Mallee. Then I left and studied and moved interstate, but it was still the same. We spoke every day. I loved him. Often we’d speak a few times in the one day.
‘Tom was the second twin, you know. Second twins are often sicker…but you’d know all about that.’
I wondered about Tom’s disability: ’Was it physical or intellectual, or both?’
‘It was both. Do you know, I’m buying the old family home. In the Mallee. It’s a sentimental thing, a bit silly really.’ Camilla laughed: I’m buying out the other twin. I want the house. Tom and I lived in it, Tom lived there all his life.’
 
We arrived at St Lucy’s. Children thronged in the grounds, ignoring the scores of parents who waited outside. They played and shouted and pushed and grabbed each other in the high spirits of the coming holiday, while Lucy’s eyes searched for Joe and my mind played on brothers loved and lost. On a brother who called me every day, often two, three times a day.
 
Shouting goodbyes children drifted from the gates to their parents. A tall child, erect and fair, came into view. He greeted Camilla in a sweet voice, soft, with a sort of self echo.
 
 
 
[I wish readers variously a joyous Shushan Purim, a holy Easter, and always, always – happy concatenation.]

How an intended genius became an accidental terrorist

By Posted in Life Tagged , , , , , , 4 Comments

I’ll tell you how I become a genius. I try to do it six days a week. (The seventh is the Sabbath, when I don’t have to try.) It’s not always easy, this genius business. And dangers lie in wait. Here are the steps that I follow.

 

Firstly, obtain ‘The Australian’ newspaper. Do not read it unless you want to cry. Turn to the last page of the first section*; here you’ll see the weather map for the entire continent. Below the weather you’ll find the puzzles. Avoid the Sudoku, dodge the cryptic crossword, take a quick peek at the day’s three obscure words (today’s** three are POIKILOTHERMIC, RIEM, KNARRED. I told you they were obscure. Pat yourself on the back if you know any of them. I scored one pat today. Better than average.)

Shun the Mensa puzzle. I hate people showing that they know they are smarter than I am.)

Pass now to the foot of the page. There you’ll see a wordwheel, with one letter in the centre and an additional eight or ten letters disposed in a circle at the perimeter. Our tasks are to find a single word that incorporates all the letters and none others, no repetitions etc etc; and to create as many words as possible of four letters or more.

Next to the wordwheel we find the rankings. Yesterday you’d have seen:

GOOD 23 words

VERY GOOD 28

EXCELLENT 33

GENIUS 38

I try to become a genius before bedtime. As a result some nights I need to go to bed very late.

Yesterday’s letters were INATTENTIVE. I got ‘inattentive’ like a shot. Practice makes that easy. But it was not until 22 hours had passed that I became a genius. (Incidentally, it is pretty clear the designer of the rankings is no genius: if one achieves EXCELLENT, that means she excels; none can excel her. But the genius does. What, I wonder, is the designation for one who finds fewer words than 23. “NOT GOOD”?)

 

So this is my method. I write down as many words as I can. ‘Attentive’ will be the first. Once I run out of words I start to speculate. Would ‘entant’ be a word? I know ‘extant’; perhaps ‘entant’ will be its antonym. I Google ‘entant’ and learn it’s a ridgy-didge word – in French. Spellcheck – or some other pretentious word authority lurking deep in my phone – now diverts me to ‘entertain’, ‘entente’ and other words of no relevance.

 

I juggle the letters and test other likely or less likely agglomerations for validity. And it is here that Google brings me to the attention of the AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE, ASIO, THE AUSTRALIAN BORDER FORCE and others. A red flag flies up on a screen in Langley. At Mi6 a man in an expensive grey suit flicks off a message through the dark net. Moments afterward a young woman snoozing before her screen in Canberra is aroused by a nasty chiming sound. Twenty minutes later large men in dark clothing emerge from a large vehicle. They wear bullet-proof vests and they carry semi-automatic weapons. Silently they surround my house. One carries a sledge hammer with which he knocks and they enter. There they find their enemy, an old wordnerd gazing at a screen, writing words on paper. The word he has written is ‘tannite’. ‘Aha!’ – they cry. ‘ Gotcha!’ 

 

* In the ‘Weekend Australian’ search the last page/s of Review.

 

** Today is the day of my writing, not of your reading. I write today, February 19, 2016.