Weekly Photo Challenge: Mountains

These are pics from Mt Kosciuszko – Australia’s highest mountain – taken last Christmas, would you believe, in the middle of our summer.

Mt Kosciuszko walk

We do get snow in this wide brown land, sometimes even in summer

Snow's a bit of a novelty for me

The stats - at 2228m, not quite Everest

A view from the summit

Homewards - and 6km to a chilled glass of champers

PS – I’m tired of all the gloom and doom in the world right now and having exorcised, over the last year, a few ghosts that had been hanging around for far too long, I’ll be posting alternative perspectives (if only, on occasion ) via the weekly photo challenge.

Migrations In Memoriam

Autumn, we lay lines,
unfurling across alpine waters,
to flycatch a trout’s eye

Spring,
we are copper lizards
on rocks trailing
the flowered creases
of Crackenback

Autumns and summers,
we zigzag
to the summit,
always a marking of sorts -
birthdays, deaths, waiting out
open-heart surgery -
from afar

A lifetime of seasons
ago – before I left -
you said
the mountain came down
and swallowed lives,
wanted me to know
that bad things happen elsewhere
too

as if somehow that would make
me see,
stay…

Now, it’s winter -
we’re making virgin
tracks
in snow
when the eye
of a raven catches
mine,
a gelid reminder
of these invisible scars -

the ley lines
that connect this place
to your passing

Ghosts of Christmas Past

On Crackenback Ridge,

tree ghosts,

fire-killed,

claw towards fickle clouds,

beseeching release from loamy graves

But,

the wind,

sashaying through

living snowgums,

whispers only ashen fate