Smiling at Crocodiles

From early 2013, I've tried to write a poem a day, and, strangely, that persists even now as the year's end draws near. Perhaps my brain needs disciplining. Living in Sydney with my five year old son and loving the view from the third floor up.

[incidentalcomics]

[smilingatcrocodiles]

by Grant Snider | incidentalcomics:

Poet in My Pocket

[smilingatcrocodiles]

maybe you know her poetry — Rebecca Elson, astronomer, sadly short life. there's a wikipedia entry. stumbled on by accident. sample — Land's End / Walking the Cornish Coast Path : "I didn't believe her when she said that, / That the world is its deepest and richest / Exactly where you are, always. / Each bit of the landscape / A piece from somewhere else…" (p78 her book). she did some observing at Mount Stromlo. / brings yours to mind. ¶ yes, teaching resumed, hard schedule for this aging one. j

thanks for sharing Elson's work - I don't know her stuff, but keen to read now. Good luck getting through the session!

[apoetreflects]

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath … is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange [fremde] from the strange?

Paul Celan, from his acceptance speech of the Georg Büchner Prize, 22 October, 1960 (via apoetreflects)

[climateadaptation-deactivated20]

Projections!

[riverlust-blog]

I forget the names of towns without rivers. A town needs a river to forgive the town. Whatever river, whatever town— it is much the same. The cruel things I did I took to the river. I begged the current: make me better.

Richard Hugo, from “The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, the Rivers We Carry with Us,” in Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (W. W. Norton & Co., 1984)

[mapsontheweb]

Australia divided into five states of equal population

Source: ApatheticElephant (reddit)

ApatheticElephant:

This was fun :)

Source: http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/nrpmaps.nsf/NEW+GmapPages/national+regional+profile

It was quite hard to get exactly the same populations without fiddling around with the areas around Melbourne and Sydney which would have been hard to see on the map anyway (The Melbourne and Sydney “states” here are supposed to represent their Greater Area as per the ABS). These are what the populations of these states would be: (Any better suggestions for names are welcome)

Sydney: 4,627,345

Melbourne: 4,246,345

South-Northern-Westralialand (The yellow one): 4,759,503

New South Queensland (Blue): 4,769,863

Vicnswania: (Purple) 4,791,451

I tried to make it 6 states but it just wasn’t working (plus I would have probably had to split Melbourne and Sydney somewhere awkward). Also apologies for my photo editing skills, some borders are dodgy.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Swimming in the private pool adjacent to the estuarine harbour we won’t think here on the water politics this positioning produces with parallel lines containing three generations indecipherable from my perch nine floors above - merged in the common effort to keep moving turning water.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Do not touch the water the black-on-white type spoke and the three year old within, pure untrammelled Id, not yet quashed by Superego jumped and pushed and near forced my hand down while fear of CCTV prosecution won.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Backyard cricket a practice still chased while the small ones spot the way to future doings, enamoured spectators.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Country The hills spiked by browned grass are beds so beloved of kangaroos and snakes in the sclerophyll space that hugs a town called Mudgee- named such after a people killed as invasion collateral.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Taut air

There's a heat so drying it licks the flesh from your bones curls around sinews digs under toes and leaves you blinded by white.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

You can make the same brandy sauce forge the same Christmas pudding eat the same stuffing and gravy to compose a day with the usual excess of wine and fat and everything won't be the same as we wait for the sickness that won't leave to depart our Dad's body. You do it all anyway.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Floods on the River Avon in Bath marked by etchings on the sandstone wall downstream a wizened weir keep moving in my mind in these amateur shots I grabbed by chance.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

I ask only this: some more time some more space and I know it's a decision not ours. But still I ask.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

Manly today the shark siren sounded so all got out to avoid the normally not near fish that small children more wonder at than fear.

[smilingatcrocodiles]

As we drove by the Yarra on the way to our plane, these gatherings appeared and all I wanted was to stop the car stay our flight and join a party on the fringe of a channelled river that speaks a little of the Thames.

[noosphe-re]

In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous in the communication networks, thus installing society in structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.

Manuel Castells (via inthenoosphere)

deep…

(via streets-alive)