Morning moon over Miyajima Island
See how the earth tips to the left?
This is my heart: a summer solstice
of all the love I’ve been given.
Warm
Tag Archives: childhood
Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters
I was born in an era of typewriters, snail-mail letters, no mobile phones, no emails, no personal computers. I still write letters by (untidy) hand and send them through the post. I’ve a treasure trove of letters written to me over a lifetime stashed away in my kist, including a love note from my husband, typed on a typewriter on a phone message note about 25 years ago :-), and a wonderful letter from a stranger regarding my father’s death notice in the newspaper.
And a few years ago, I discovered the many letters and postcards I’d written to my youngest niece over the years after I emigrated adorned the inside of her cupboard doors – she’d kept them all. We both prize what people have taken the time to write with us in mind.
There is one letter, though, that really breaks my heart when I re-read it now. It’s from a boy who grew up in South Africa in the years just after Apartheid officially ended. His name is Freedom and, at the time that he wrote this letter, he was a child without very many worldly possessions at all, but he was loved, and was full of joy and hope. And, as his letter shows, he had a genuine appreciation for so very little. 
Freedom’s mum, widowed early in her marriage, worked beyond hard to give him a good education, and she had high hopes for his future. He is now a young man but, unfortunately, due to some nefarious influences and bad choices, his life isn’t turning out so well.
My 5 picks from this week’s photo challenge at The Daily Post:
Lena Maree
Tonight,
I think of my maternal grandmother,
(Chelsea buns, vetkoek, hugs to save the world)
passed some 30-odd years ago –
“Kari, Kari…”, her loving voice as I drift to sleep
and remember that stark day
she fell crossing the road
outside the Durban Museum
And I, five, thinking she was dead,
screamed!
But she did not let go
of my hand, and smiled
in her usual, generous way
as strangers helped her to her feet.
Always the comforter of souls –
Sweet, wonderful Lena Maree.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic
‘Science of Nostalgia: It was first thought to be a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause,” but it turns out that nostalgia is good for your brain. And there’s science to prove it.‘
More of this article in The New York Times
I took this (rather overexposed) photo of my nieces cooking dinner around 20 years ago when we all still lived on the African continent. We had given one of them a children’s cookbook for Christmas, and they invited us over for dinner—a three-course meal—which they cooked using recipes from the book. They were such sweet, funny munchkins – still are 😉
For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post.
Weekend Prompt: Childhood Revisited
It wasn’t smells or tastes or dear old Patchy,
or Teddy or Polly or clothes that were scratchy,
but bright orange blossoms beaming out from my walls,
retro symbols of happiness from ceiling to floor –
my first bedroom’s wallpaper sticks like glue
in my mind to this day (my sibling’s too –
at the time they thought he had chronic colic
but, it seems, brother’s wall-art was making him sick –
all those racing-cars whizzing about his head
(he confessed, years later) made him dizzy in bed).
So my first memory – wallpaper, and subtropical heat,
and the tickles of mum’s kisses under my feet.
In response to the Daily Post’s Weekend Prompt: Childhood Revisited – What is your earliest memory? Describe it in detail, and tell us why you think that experience was the one to stick with you.
The Same By Any Other Name
Image via http://www.schoolphotoproject.com
Names of affection,
(Little Eddie, Sweet Baboo)
projection and deflection,
(Camille, Flame, Agapanthus)
colours and food,
(Pumpkin, Bean, Red, Blu)
some, unmentionably rude 😉
****************************
Prompted by this post at Go Jules Go
Weekly Photo Challenge: Hands
In the blink of an eye
What
metaphysical thing plays
out in that
split
second
between your smile
and being stolen
away
by an umbrella
on the wind
to a life less
lived?
An unprincipled principle?
Irregular regularity?
i do not know; we cannot know…
perhaps
you do,
now
Surface Tension
Dying –
it’s a little like that back there
“Get a tan, man!” – the beastie boys jeer,
white-raged, she’s facing off fear
Out here, the limits are none
her swirling strands of red-yellow-gold, spun
into halos burning bright as the sun,
jewelled auras for silent incantation,
reposed in peaceful contemplation
of fancies, unbound by vituperation
underwater, she is as fish,
swims human stark antithesis,
becomes her Aphrodite wish
———-
Updated for Sideview’s weekend theme of Beauty
ill wind
filicide
closed you in at night,
no space to breath, but
we thought we were
safe, years
on
a sparkling day,
something faceless
on the breeze,
snaring
your shadow,
hermetic fate
sealed
by a pernicious beast, forever
changing the way
we navigate
the world
A History of Fear
it’s
the dark, those monsters
under the bed, first day
at school – bruce m trying to kiss
you in the sandpit
and hell-to-pay for jumping in every puddle on your way home,
men in hearses and dark
glasses – stranger-danger,
not running solo, nor flying, but
an umbrella on the wind – cruel and unusual,
old man on the street corner –
feathered hat, immaculately
polished shoes, threadbare clothes,
a broken headlamp in the rear-view
and unspeakable things,
and then, you know, the death of a parent,
DNA gone awry,
that your actions caused this –
suffering,
not of your own shadow but
rage, betrayals,
the sound
of your own screaming,
depravity of infant
body-bombs,
spectres – Margaret Hassan, the Falling
Man,
Afghani children smashed
into dirt playgrounds,
the death of dreams, sadness
of others,
hearts beating through walls,
and then,
somehow, nothing
much
at
all
…
least of all
death
Dad III
The smell of sawdust
takes me to a time
you’d send me to pick leaves for the silkworms
after your tools turned on you
(usually the ratchet screwdriver)
my young ears safe at the mulberry tree,
brother’s mosquito gang
wheelieing up the laneway
for a smoke and 50cc tune-up
with their favourite neighbourhood oldie,
night-scented gardenia
mixed with varnish,
crickets and
Erroll Garner
illuminating the nightwaves
Unspeakable
Two friends, two lives
one, a garden variety drama,
the other,
a monstrous horror movie
profanity
unfolding slowly
picking off joys one by one
like psychopathic forces of nature
stripping away
what should have been
for one so precious:
limbs like the wind, a planet-sized brain
that crazy infectious laughter
atrophied
by the madness of grief and disbelief
I could no longer watch,
even through my fingers
beeblu blog 
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