Interlude

Chargarden*

( *A fiction. )

A cicada's singing a twist of loud static in the shadow out under my window. Across the hill, lit by embers, a plume of billowing, licorice smoke tells me all has been erased. I wait, my fingers blackened, the window blown out by the heat.

This shadow, I, who has been thrust into the ruin of a sky, has crash-landed. It is a black day, and the broken branches crackle beneath my feet.

In this territory, mine for however long it takes for a fire to burn, I catch oncoming glimpses of green. Divesting themselves of the hold of the conflagration, the cicadas are still, done with their urgency.

The smog lifts off over us. Our bones and skin have been seared. There's only the night and there's only the sun.

A coolness squeezes under the branching heat. I stare out the blown window, not to nothingness, but to a movement come though from over the hills, asking me to wait and be still.

A Fidelity

 

I confess to having no political allegiance. For me it's hard enough trying to understand my neighbour without having to try to understand a game played without compassion. To me, anything that veers to the right or the left is suspect.
So then, I've found Tibor Dery's 'Niki - the story of a dog', published in English by Secker and Warburg in 1958. 
A Hungarian from a prosperous background, the author sympathized with Communism up to a certain point in the 1950s when he began to satirize it. From what I can gather, he'd been both a popular figure in Hungarian culture, and then its outcast.
"On November 13th, 1957, the Supreme Hungarian Court pronounced sentence against four leading Hungarian writers, accused of "hostile activities during the events of November 1956 and subsequently aiming at 'overthrowing the order of the state.' "

Communism, like Fascism, equals death to me. Both of them are a sickness of the mind and the feelings. You see the author above. It would seem that Tibor Dery had humanity sufficient to write this story, a story of a man and his wife befriended unreservedly by a stray.

"The imprisonment of Dery and his fellow-writers brought protests from all over the world." 
I'm still reading this marvelous book, capturing, as it does, the paranoia and restrictiveness of a police state. The corrosion of the regime can only have occurred because some among the oppressed remembered to love, and remembered to report that love.

Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night

Since I was a boy, I've been in awe of the song of blackbirds, especially in midwinter, at the crack of dawn.

Introduced into south-eastern Australia in the 1850s, though we are already blessed with a multitude of wonderful birds, the blackbird amuses and charms. This book for children, by David Ross ( with  lovely illustrations by Jennie Corbett ) published in 1968, is one of two by this author I've just lately found.

'Blackbird' is standing up for his right to exist in the domain of the resident thrush, hence 'Birdfight' as the title. Nature is a battle.

Thrushes are few, in Australia, and shy, but there are many other birds who will compete with this intelligent creature. I see them scurrying across the lawn, peering furtively from branches, their bright,spirited eyes alert to danger and opportunity.

Our blackbird, I'm relieved to report, finds his mate and lives to see his life throughout, tested by the world around him unscathed. Courage leads to continuity. The sparkle in his eye sees a dawn unending.

Waving the Flag

Corymbia ( formerly Eucalyptus ) ficifolia, the red-flowering gum from Western Australia, thrives in the grains of a sandy soil. Which is just as well, because I have little else but sand here at home, this parched and burning summer.  And there's not too much thriving...

I'm cranky as all hell. It's been a rotten summer. Yes, the drought's apparently over, but Melbourne's had 0.6mm of rain this January, compared to its usual 48mm. How can anything bloodily flower?

This has. There are a few here at home. Resplendant, glorious, full of the humming of bees, they are waving themselves above the rest of the dead or dying garden.

Such redness. I've given up hope lately, so tired I am of trying to keep the garden alive. You'll know that I cannot show you the worst of what I stare at, ineffectually. So challenging it is, to pretend to have a garden, when the assemblage of plants you've cultivated wither before you. Hurrah for these!

Hurrah too, for my beautiful magpie, who has this summer seen his playful offspring killed by foxes. He and his mate have been keeping away from their regular haunts, shocked, I feel, by what has happened. They'll recover soon, I hope, as I will, from this awful negation.

With only a Thinness

I'd not like to be looking at orange, the colour of fire, but Cotyledon orbiculata speaks suggestively,
now in these nights where lavender clouds drift across a broad baby-blue sky.

I have caught a cocoon in my flowering gum. Wedged on its branch, with a web of fibres holding it in place, I'm hoping there'll be some magnificent butterfly.

The flowering gum quoted is on the left, and will have champagne-pink flowers soon. The sky looks tenderly gentle, but beware, for tomorrow it will break the ground beneath it with its pounding insistence.

Until then, I bear the candle-flames of this succulent as if they were nursing me.

My woofer shares a similar opinion. She says, Faisal, we'd like to get out of here, wouldn't we?

Not everything has been scratched in this thing called life. I do not believe in scratches, any more than I believe in the dead deadening. We're keeping much alive.

We are bending. We all must bend. And in our bending, there is flowering.

Isn't it gorgeous, this black Aeonium? It's in the front garden, under she-oaks, toughing it out.

It's been a peculiarly kind day, with cool breezes. We are missing, yet, some rain. It will come. The blueness above lets me out of a problem: sooner or later the thinness will fatten, and all the silver and the orange will be overwhelmed by wetness, streaming, I hope, into the life of  a ground now derelict, burnt, beyond struggling. 

It's Catching Fire

 It's not a question now of how much hotter the Earth will get, but of how quickly...

...the trees turn into what they can, countering the heat.

My little doo-da, and all the life around us, is going to have to face a tumultuous world. Isn't it humankind that has brought this extremity on, what with its greed to possess and its greed to control? 

We all joke about the weather. But I stare out of glassy windows, the air dead, the air hot as a stove-top, nothing in my hands making a difference...

...Eucalypts like this are among the many survivors that have stood up to transgressions inflicted upon their world. Can they be twisted interminably?

I wonder what gardening will be like, what sort of gardening there'll be, in a world screwed up, and screwed up by human will.  

Will there be any chance to rest, soon? Will the wheels stop, as we'd like them to, and will significant numbers of human beings wake up enough to repair the damage?

The last thing I want to see is suffering, but most of humanity doesn't notice it. It is asleep. It couldn't be called a natural sleep, as you see here, but it could be called a negligence...

Thus, there is hope. There's a hope that whatever we've done, it'll be forgiven now.