Days on Decks
Our lives are full of little rituals and daily habits. Some are as menial as the morning routine. Others are the ritual of catching up with friends, over meals, on decked verandahs and so on. This free verse is about life and love and how it can happen around timber decks. It finishes with a note of how our lives can be like timber. Our knotty parts absorbed by the grain of our lives. All of this contributes to the beauty.
Days on Decks
(i)
Crisp
Early morn.
Crunch, crunch
The icy frost is
Under foot.
The biting air nips
At unsuspecting ears, nose
Eyes and toes!
And the panels of the deck
Slip
Under the soles.
(ii)
A cacophony of currawongs perch
Above where we are.
A carpenter’s canopy
Behind the house.
A bedecked surface
Where the table is set
Pieces of pizza
Homemade and kneaded
With love and care
Sit upon plates
Headed by generous pourings
Of Barossa Reds.
And the stories flow.
And we hope
That currawong
Perched above
Won’t open its ‘bomb-bay’
Onto our precious pieces
Perched on plates.
(iii)
Down the road towards rivermouth
A south head
In the near dark.
A capped head
Standing in sentinel,
A beacon in the blur.
And
Upon a deck
A face full of welcome
Shines with possum-like eyes
And a beaming smile.
So we enter
The threshold of timbers.
One deck gives way
To another below
Like a cascade of warmth
Closer to the heart and hearth
Of the home.
Lengths from hewn logs
For us to lean on
Table our tales and support,
Steaming mugs,
And stories among friends.
(iv)
So we are built
Upon little rituals
The daily habits
The visits with friends
That graft together
The grain of our lives.
Binding the knots
Warmly holding the blemishes
To create a total
Work of beauty.
Simon C.J. Falk 9 June 2015
Simon's still stanza 