I’m drinking ancestors’ tears,
praising their liquid forms — sip, sip —
savouring them oh so slowly
in my evening G&T (or two) &
pissing them out all warm
& mellow (for posterity).
I like to visualise late Uncle Ken
(an avid birder) feathered & re-born,
nesting on a patch of grass — ruffling
rain across his plover’s sooty helmet.
Many happy returns Uncle Ken!
Swimming has never really been my thing, yet
given the opportunity I’d stream along with
long-gone buddy Jamie — jostling rocks
like naughty adolescents — frothing
down New Zealand’s icy Rotorua rapids.
I know that some of us have fingers crossed
for our re-birth, but don’t you think there are
too many Marilyn Monroes and Charlemagnes?
And let’s not talk of Egypt!
I wonder why so many elements
return in sentient form.
What hordes became the concrete pylons
holding up the Sydney Harbour Bridge?
Who might now be swooshing
through white ripples — as an orange
fishing lure — for turbot?
Notoriously difficult to catch I hear;
just like my long-gone Aunty Mae
— the boys loved her.
You too will touch the stuff of ancestors
as we travel through our time-bound days.
Perhaps you’ll suck them
on a blob of oozing Brie de Meaux scooped
from a milk-white platter, laden with
ripened figs and apricots.
Perhaps you left them, quietly
suffocating by the roadside
in their mother’s pouch.
Perhaps you mingled with them
eons ago, within the throat
of summer’s swallow as she reached
to feed her fledglings.
Dear fellow human,
please remember:
WE are seven octillion atoms moving
in one mighty dance until — well
— until our present feet are still.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was a French chemist living in the eighteenth century (1743-1794). His discovery of the Law of Conservation of Mass found that while matter may change its shape, the mass of any closed system can neither be added to or removed.