Ivy and Gold

For the last four days, I’ve been watching the late afternoon with more attention than usual. The evening sunshine gingerly lights up the thick green creepers on the hill behind my workplace. I watch the silver fern as the wind blows and go down for a walk to feel the evening sun on my skin. I look forward to reading on my ride back home, and the slow descent of the rest of the evening on my being. It makes me glad to be alive.

I want to write about all those things that have filled me with the mirth of an unruffled kind. However, for once, I won’t. I’m just going to try and catalogue joy. As I always say, this:

The Long Road

“You travelled down through foreign lands,
Touched mountain tops and golden sand,
Seen pyramids and temples made of stone.
Keep seashells in a cashmere scarf,
A treasured book of photographs
In every single one, you stand alone.”

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry

Elsa heard one of the doctors at Mum’s hospital saying that Granny “could start a fight in an empty room,” but when Elsa told Granny she just looked miffed and said, “What if it was the room that started it?”

Sunset

Every Thing for Me is Something Else

All night the wind howling, skittering off the windowpane, dragging its dirty fingernails. Autumn light shortening like a deer’s eye dimming inside the red cave of a python’s belly Continue Reading

Somebody’s Love

Mixed-Berries Tiramisu

It was delicious.

Small Wins

Reminders

where
you are.
is not
who
you are.

– circumstances

by nayyirah waheed

Spoken-Word Poetry Such as This

“Dear Sky, what do we look like from there?
Do we look pretty?”

The Feeling of Being a Part of this Magnificent Universe

We’d pass icebergs floating in the middle of the ocean [in Antarctica]. They were gigantic, with strange formations carved into them. They were so haunting and majestic you could feel your heart break, but really they’re just chunks of ice and they mean nothing. There were ebony beaches dusted with snow, and sometimes there was a lone emperor penguin, giant, with orange cheeks, standing on an iceberg, and you had no idea how he got there, or how he was going to get off, or if he even wanted to get off. On another iceberg, a smiling leopard seal, sunning herself, looked like she wouldn’t hurt a fly, but she’s one of the most vicious predators on earth, and she’d think nothing of leaping up and grabbing a human in her razor teeth and pulling him into the freezing water and shaking him until his skin slid off. Sometimes I looked over the edge of the ship at the sea ice, like white jigsaw puzzle pieces that will never fit together, and passing through sounded like clinking cocktails. There were whales everywhere.