CCLXXI - A Day in January

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A River of Stones had a challenge

on Facebook to write something insightful

about the small things in your life every day in January.  

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Rather than doing a set of 31 posts

I compiled them all into a composite about one day in January.

A Day in January
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It’s dark but there is the sense that others
Are already awake; sounds from beyond the thick
Velvet drapes and cool cotton covers:
With utmost patience a magpie feeds its chick.

The gentle cooing of the doves on the roof;
The lorikeets crippling the unwary with scimitar nips;
The ravens’ mournful cawing, remotely aloof;
 Wattlebirds tout “Hot pies, hot pies, chips, chips, chips”

Cars pass up and down the street,
From the tyre’s sound, the road is dry.
A jogger pounds away his knees and feet.
Distantly, a tram clangs and trundles by.

The room hangs over me as if made of wool,
Or as if an overly embracing creeper.
I want to yield to day-break’s pull;
Beside me the rhythmic breathing of a sleeper.

Warm bodies move restlessly in nightshirts and
Crawl out of the covers, into the musty gloom:
With the parting of the curtains,
The greys dissolve and colours flood the room.

The movement excites the feathered kin
Who sense food will soon eventuate.
Kitchen scraps, neatly diced, in a well-used tin
Are delivered with deference to the sacrificial plate.

Plum jam, home-made with love and care
Awaits to have after the feeding of the fowls.
Served on toast where all the seeds are there;
It’s good, I’m told, for the movement of my bowels.

Hot, black and syrupy, perhaps excessively so:
Espresso in a china cup of purest of white.
However else the day may come or go,
There’s some consolation that it started right.

Who is that in the mirror?  Watching me   
Prepare to lather a stranger’s face?
Grey hair, wrinkles and sagging skin sting me
With the truth about time’s relentless forward pace.

Against a wealth of previous experience
I check the to see what is happening in the news.
The basic stories have a strange intransience,
Just the names are changed, and the locations too.

A mug of coffee, the second one for the day,
Goes with me as I go to see how the garden sits.
New weeds, new flowers,  new growth and decay;
Insects and possums vie for the most tender bits.

Warm, succulent, juicy and red
Satsumas that survived the possum horde
Are a plum prize of the fruitful garden bed,
Some are eaten fresh, the rest are stored.

In the garden, plants get gently squeezed:
Geraniums, basil, mints and verbenas;
The heady aromas so rudely released
Transport your mind to distant arenas.

As if in giant cobwebs, the grapes are draped
In netting, to deter the birds;
Last year not a single grape escaped
The rotten little pecking…um…herds.

My companion when prowling the garden
Is a pair of good, strong secateurs;
Prune hard and then beg a pardon
Works better than asking permission first.

Many years ago, when she was going into town,
My grandmother had a special city-only treat:
A pork and pineapple sandwich, white not brown,
From a small shop, just off Flinders Street.

In her memory, I made such a meal,
With some of the left over weekend roast,
It’s the closest I come to genealogical zeal,
And to my Granny, I raised a silent toast.

Forty expected today, quite unpleasantly hot;
That’s one oh four in the old Fahrenheit scale.
Air-conditioned, the cinemas seem just the spot
To escape from reality, in all it’s over heated detail.

Meryl, as always, was right on the mark
But pools of light flicker as cell phones intrude
And strangers beside me, crunched stuff in the dark;
Is two hours too long to go without food?

We exit from our dark and plush cocoon
Into a seething whirlpool of humanity.
I feel out of place in this mad cartoon
And leave at once, to protect my sanity.

The day has knocked the plants around:
The hydrangeas are hit quite hard,
The lettuce lies limply on the ground
And the raspberries, crisp and scarred.

Salvias are upright and enjoy the heat;
Cold drinks do a roaring trade;

The driveway cooks unwary feet

And open-beaked birds stand in the shade.

Zucchinis, known as courgettes to some,
Grow faster than you can collect them.
But it doesn’t take long for the welts to come
If I handle them without protection.

Cold and amber, the tall glass is dewed

With beads of condensed appreciation;

Beer that has been so carefully brewed
Is an elixir, deserving heartfelt adulation.

At the end of the day when the work is done
Few rewards will so wash your dusty cares away
As a cold beer; sometimes even more than one
If it has been an overly dusty care-filled day.

The evening is hot, the mercury yet to fall
Relief in rain, we are told, is on the way.
The Bureau is 60% confident in it’s call
But, disbelieving, I water the garden anyway.

Out for a walk, beneath twilight skies,
I greet passing strangers with a cheerful ‘Hi!’.
Some respond with a start, as if caught by surprise,
While others avert their gaze and hurry by.

Tending to the charred offerings on the grill
Of a four-burner, gas-fired barbecue;
Gives man, the hunter, a throw-back thrill
And, as before, leaves the salads for his wife to do.

Mosquitoes announce their presence with a whine,
That turns sane people into anxious self-hitters.
There are those who swear on Intelligent Design
But none give a reason for these sucking little critters.

A quartet treacles through the night,
Playing Mozart, with mathematical precision.
The music is a sublime delight,
An escape from reality’s mundane prison.

The gentle caresses in familiar places;
The discarding of clothes that encumber;
The culmination in a loving embrace,
A genital sneeze and then so to slumber.

The rain does come, in the middle of the night,
The air is of the earth, a sense of life on-going.
The patter on the roof is a visceral delight
And the storage tanks are overflowing.
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The house is now quiet, darkly, softly so;
A clock marks the measured steps of time.
The moon casts a timid, tentative glow;
And somewhere a possum eats my vines.

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© 2012 J Cosmo Newbery

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