Days on Decks

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

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Colours Shaded Blue

This one is hot off the press!  News has not been good in recent days. There have been various changes, griefs and losses in our lives.  Friends move away. Others have family with cancer. People in our State (of NSW) are beset by devastating fires. This poem takes up some of the mood and moves to concrete, Christian hope.

 

 

Colours Shaded Blue

If colours fill our lives

Then these days are shaded blue;

As fresh news comes upon us

We face this shadowed hue.

 

Change and loss and illness

Fill our spoken words and screens;

The unknowing makes us wonder

As we tremble at unseens.

 

Sometimes we have too much information,

At others, not enough;

But when those near us suffer

The going becomes rough.

 

It’s this sense of having no power

To change or help or fix

The situation there before us,

There are no short-cut tricks.

 

So, we travel as companions

And together share the load;

Like the broken figure on the cross

Who struggled a gravely road.

 

To truly understand each other’s

Heavy heart and throbbing head,

It helps us to remember

God shared in our living and our dead.

 

When we were misunderstood the other day,

Remember in Jesus’ preaching

And his crowd that walked away.

 

When others round us suffer

And we grieve who or what we’ve lost;

Jesus’ heart grieved his mate Lazarus

Yes, God does know the cost.

 

If we really believe in Jesus

Then we believe God lived our way,

And is with us as much tomorrow

As he is with us today.

 

But where, O where to find him?

Well look beside you here,

He’s in a friend’s embrace,

And in another’s face of cheer.

 

He’s in the person bringing flowers,

The one with casseroles at your door,

His spirit washes you in the shower,

And wants to show you more.

 

More of his peaceful presence

In a buddy sitting by your side,

Even when no word passes,

When in the car you ride.

 

Even in these days of troubles

When our feelings are coloured blue,

Our God is right there with us,

Because we see him in you.

 

 

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