Sunday, 19th July, 2009

To misquote J. Alfred Prufrock: "I have measured out my life in coffee cups"... the Mona Lisa, rendered in coffee, at the Aroma Festival at the Rocks. One kilometre (or so) of creamy deliciousness, all along the foreshore.

Tuesday, 14th April, 2009

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as always)

Saw Travesties as part of our Sydney Theatre subscription with the girls. The Opera House is magical at night - it looms out of the darkness and hovers over you, ethereally and somewhat spectrally.

Da-da!

Monday, 30th March, 2009

All in a hot and copper sky...

Another snatch of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He does tend to be a bit of a mindworm (that's a Jasper Fforde reference).

Tuesday, 17th March, 2009

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea... 

This is my pictorial commentary on Archibald McLeish's gorgeous gorgeous poem.

Monday, 16th March, 2009

You know what? I find this box of tissues hilarious. Who has these jobs? Who gets to write poetry on a box of tissues? And what on earth do "rosy sun-kissed cheeks" have to do with my premature winter cold?

It also bothers me that
a) "natures" is lacking an apostrophe, and
b) it is two syllables askew of being a proper haiku.

I find that extremely irritating.

Sniff.

Wednesday, 25th February, 2009

A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A chocolate lurking by.

(With profound apologies to S.T. Coleridge and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".)

Thursday, 12th February, 2009

Driving past such beautiful wet scrub on my way to work in the morning, I feel privileged to live in such a beautiful country, although as Dorothea Mackellar famously wrote, it is one of both "beauty" and "terror". While the dour skies hover over here in Sydney, bushfires have been ravaging small towns north of Melbourne. At times like this, her words are sobering and challenging, in the extreme:

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold.

Tuesday, 3rd February, 2009

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
~ Joyce Kilmer (American poet)

I pass this tree every day on my way home... at roughly about this height! There's something in the play of light and shadow in the grooves of the bark that just attracts me. I think it's just beautiful.

Wednesday, 21st January

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," says the eponymous J. Alfred of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" fame (a poem by T.S. Eliot). I think I could too! This is Muse, one of my favourite haunts in Summer Hill, when I have the time. Taken on a typical Sydney afternoon when the swelter turns to storm.