Rose Lucas
In the end should it arrive slow enough I know I’ll see again these streets where I have walked and walked down grid and lane over cobblestones grass and macadam thinking talking watching the world through tumbling seasons from days of prams and playgrounds to longed-for lockdown walks always trailing threads of conversation and close attention the finding and the losing wandering together or separate under plane trees and elms their bare arms transforming into a dense canopy a flicker of green then red the curl and press of roots cracking pavements gardeners tending clearing dead-heading the passing flush the glory of faded blooms giving way to nubs of something new droop of lilac or buddleia wisteria winding the length of wooden verandas lavender hedges pressing or the extravagance of birds of paradise leaning quizzical and magnificent over the fence or bright red callistemon decked out like Christmas – once in the outer reaches of scraggy late winter branches we watched an intensification of stick feather cobweb taking daily shape as a magpie pair crisscrossed the verge collecting materials so that what had only been imagined came for a time closer to being some thing say a matted basket to cradle the future despite all its uncertainties and so this fabric of my life this threading of moments of thoughts and particular words of what is seen or smelled or touched the repeated pathways of the familiar and the wondrous world that still unfolds petal by petal and the anchor of home its flickering shade of ornamental vine all held in this rising and falling of breath then all gone in an instant
Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet, academic and critic from Naarm. Her most recent poetry collections are This Shuttered Eye (liquid Amber Press, 2021) and Increments of the Everyday (Puncher and Wattmann, 2022).
Old Water Rat Publishing 