Mabel’s mother had warned her to stay in the middle of the leaf, not to stray towards the edges, but being Mabel, who created her own adventures, she had gone exploring. Now, her life literally hanging by a thread, she wished she had listened.
But…what strange, giant creature is this that’s come to rescue her?
Torpedo Bug, suburban bushland, Sydney, Australia. 1/60, f7.1, ISO 200, flash, handheld single shot
Jethro had enjoyed his dream sleep, comfily suspended upside-down by a silk thread throughout the starlit night. But now, out hunting his breakfast, he was on alert for the dumb, fluffy cat who frequented his patch of garden.
Fluffy-bum, as her Human called her, was hardly cunning enough to intentionally stalk him, but in an undiscerning act of curiosity, she might smack him into oblivion with a giant paw.
Just as well he has eyes in the back, front, and sides of his head…
Jumping Spider in my garden, Sydney, Australia. 1/100, f7.1, ISO 200, flash, handheld
Imelda, grumpy at discovering just that morning that only the male of her species grew wings, had a tussle with her dreadlocks iron. Now she was on her way to a plant sap festival, her hair a hot mess.
Cotton Mealy Bug, Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia. 1/50, f5.6, ISO 200, flash, handheld,
Horace did not see the Human at first. He was too busy trying to extricate himself from the web of an orb-weaving spider in the silver spruce on the driveway.
But now they clocked one another…
Australian Stick Mantis, in my garden in Sydney, Australia. 1/25, f3.2, ISO 100, ambient light, handheld,
I asked ChatGPT the following…
This was its response…
I then asked…
We’re living in a whole new world.
What do you think?
I talk to them at 3am, my children, I tell them about the Doomsday Vault in Svalbard, how it’s beset by melting permafrost; I talk about the hairy frogfish, the predator- prey cycle of life, how humans keep birds in cages, and how travel to Proxima Centauri b would take them 6,300 years, a little cosmic joke, ha ha; I explain that the gang-rape of a mother in Kyiv next to her child and dead husband is called collateral damage, that the weight of a butterfly of uranium destroyed Hiroshima, and that no single wild species depends for its survival on the Freak Show that is the Human Race; I tell them that we fail to learn from human history and how they are blessed never to have been born. ©️2022 K Price
As I ride pillion through this primeval forest, I don’t think
of the ancient trees, how they give us the smooth paper leaves
on which we love to press down with granite
made from the centre of the earth;
nor of the fungi beneath, how one fruiting body brings us certain death
and another alters our consciousness
with its saprotrophic strangeness;
nor of the native bees, how their furry-bodied industries
sustain our food security and survival
as a species;
but instead
of Mr Tait, whose smile
was a warning, and how he taught
us to bookmark a book with its own pages
without damage, and how he showed us how to mitigate
injury from possible falls when using a chair
as a ladder, and how he use to call
all the boys Fathead!
©️2020 K Price
Astride the KTM beast, we ride
the country roads of New England, passing mini
country churches not big enough to swing
an axe (other than the verbal kind). At the crossroads
in one hamlet, there are two, along with a pub
and a servo, and I wonder if on Sundays
the population of around 150 evenly splits
itself between the green fibro Catholic and the beige fibro
Anglican House of God diagonally opposite. Or do the agnostics
and atheists muddy the holy water? Truth is
I’ve never seen any flock
to attendance, so who goes there? The farmers
praying for rain? The fossickers praying
for that nugget, the alcoholics praying for forgiveness
for beating their wives and children senseless after one
too many at the public house on a Friday night?
Or are these houses of worship mere relics
of the past along with the town’s faith
on account of all that flood, fire
and filicide?
©️2020 K Price
Leaning into corner after corner on a wheat-
fringed country road, we come upon
a pair of vintage Renaults sitting side by side
in the paddock, like an old couple enjoying
the sun. But age has wearied them and the years
condemned to a slow rusting death, the for-sale sign
long faded. Who drove them to their final destination
full of hope they would go as a bonded
pair to loving home?
©️2020 K Price
I’m riding pillion on the KTM beast
when our silhouette on the damp bitumen paints my scarf flying
like a Siamese fighter’s tailfin in the slipstream
and I think of you
Isadora
and wonder if in that nano-second that the forces of the universe conspired
to smash you into the cobblestones of the Riviera
you had a chance to think:
How absurd!
I tuck in the delinquent ends
I wouldn’t want your spectacular end
to be in vain.
©️2020 K Price
🍃🍂🍁
Autumn steals in like a quiet
cat, looking for a warm place
to settle. On the mountains
in the copses and through the forests, the trees rustle
amongst themselves, and blush
at her touch. Do the beetles know
of this? I do not know, they talk
to their gods in tongues.
©️2019 K Price
The sea knows
loss, its ancient suspirations inhale
terra firma grit by grit
The sea knows
abyssal hobgoblins well up
from their deep-rutted trenches
even on sunshiny days
they manifest their stinking grotesquery
on sabulous shores
The sea knows
violence
never sleeps
is always sighing
Like you the sea knows
some things
are worse
than dying.
© 2018 Karen Price
Now, this makes my heart glad 😄🥂🍾
On my return to blogging in April, I was deeply saddened to discover that one of my favourite poets of all time had died in December 2016.
Cynthia Jobin was a blogging friend and a masterful poet, whose art was superior in form, structure and rhythm. But what I love most in her work is the way she infused it with mischief. Her intellect and humour shines through her poetry.
Sadly, Cynthia’s WordPress site is no longer up. I hope her unpublished work will not be lost.
I will miss you, Little Old Lady. You were a beautiful light in the darkness.
My work meeting finished at 4pm. I still had minutes to type but was also due to meet a friend for dinner and the theatre at 6:30pm on the other side of The Bridge.
Anybody who lives in Sydney knows that trying to get across the Sydney Harbour Bridge by car into the city from 5pm onwards gobbles time. So I made the journey at 4 and typed the minutes here. A lovely way to end the work day.
I’m in a city of 14.50 million
(give or take a few, including me)
souls. I know no-one
here. I’m a nano-human, a speck
in the smog. I make myself big
riding the subways with no-one
with light-coloured hair. No-one notices
the gweilo; the ghost-person, I think,
until I step into the deluge at Shanghai
Library, and a dark-haired
girl steps in time beside me, her umbrella
banishing the rain, her words, my ghostliness
“Where are you going?
Can I take you there?”
Cynthia Jobin, over at littleoldladywho.net, is one of the finest poets I’ve read. Her poems are exquisitely crafted, evocative, and at times wonderfully mischievous.
A recent poem of Cynthia’s – The Palpable Obscure – is a spine-tingling evocation of the ongoing mystification endured by those of us who have experienced the death of a loved one. In it, she writes:
“Once a day, at least, I stop to wonder
where you are.”
Is this puzzlement not at the very heart of the Human Condition?
If my father were alive today, the 27th November 2015, he would be 83. I started this blog mainly as a response to the lingering grief I felt about his dying. And this poem, which I first posted on the 27th November 2010, is about the day he died.
Like Cynthia, I still wonder…
Eternal Mysteries ( a repost)
With the ring back on your finger
you sighed and slipped away
but forever it’s a mystery
where you went that day
Did you see them watching you
and whispering in your ear?
When you took your final journey,
did you know that they were there?
Did you sense that we were not?
No-one can ever know,
yet child-like we still ask ourselves –
that day, where did you go?
————————–
She’s there every morning, glaring down at me, when I open my eyes.
“If you’re going nowhere, neither is that extra chin”, she seems to say. “I have limits, you know. If we’re to ever get any closer, you should be out there, not hitting the snooze button repeatedly!”
She’s right, of course, my ideal dress size. I breached her boundaries a long time ago and won’t be fitting back in any time soon, unless I get out there and move. Every single day.
“And cut out the champagne while you’re at it, lardarse.”
By my calculations, transforming Matilda’s reproach into rapprochement is about 720 km away.
Ho hum.
The Matilda Dress
When the sun turns
away to southern lands
we find ourselves awake
on a strange, familiar shore
where those who’ve gone
before sleep beneath moss
in forest graves, and wild apples
jump the fences
Across the Baltic Sea
history comes full circle.
Sandra Bland, after her arrest. Source: AFP
Eyes send the message;
Aliens failed to read
rage, despair, defeat.———————————————
beeblu blog 
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