originally published in 2016 in fourWtwenty-seven
Her silver notebook splays open,
Silhouetted pages soar upwards like Opera House sails on a postcard
where sky is too blue and grass impossibly green.
Brushing a skerrick of chook feather from her apron,
she writes, discards, drafts, amends.
Slings word strings
of colour, song, memory together on the page
til the poem-in-progress catapults up, up into that bluest sky.
The moment for crafting soon passes, however.
Too much tweeting and cackling on the back verandah,
chooks’ feet scratch the screen door; broody ones must be fed!
Her silver notebook thuds down onto the leather desk-top.
Scooping up chook pellets in the old tin dipper from a hessian sack on the porch, that
poem-in-the-making will have to wait!
Acknowledgement
The free range chooks in the photo who come and visit my sister on Bilgola Plateau.
Riparian 